pauper.

Even as our physical childhood is a prelude to mental adultship, so
old age, our "second childhood," is a prelude to our soul adultship,
and the character of our old age period is prophetic of our state in
the soul life.

There are some extremely aged persons whom we cannot, if we have any
degree of interior vision, classify as old; the youth and beauty and
love-radiance of their interior nature is so potent that it shines
through the worn and wrinkled garment that covers it; and we know that
when that garment shall have been removed by the hands of Death, that
the soul will be clothed in radiant youth and beauty, and light.

This is indeed the esoteric cause of the widespread repudiation of a
mental recognition of age.

"I am seventy years young" says the man who hopes for eternal youth
and life; and if he says it from the standpoint of wisdom--the wisdom
that knows himself an immortal soul fired by pure and holy spiritual
love, then indeed his words are truly symbolical.

But if he utters them merely in desperate defiance of organic decay,
they are empty and he will enter the after-life, even as he leaves
this one, without having attained that which he craves.

This truth is an integral part of the cosmos, from which there is no
appeal; no reprieve; no immunity, no "respecter of persons." The law
is absolute and it is also just. Pure and perfect love is the price of
immortal life. There is no other "coin of the realm."

"But," questions the initiate, "why cannot those who know, if there be
such in the world today, give us this mystical formula? Why do they
not tell us how we may reach this desirable state of spiritual
sex-love, which affords such divine happiness to those who find it?"
The query is pertinent and the desire is natural; the doubt of its
reality is consistent, yet we are constrained to say that in the very
nature of such inquiry the disciple of the Hidden Wisdom voices his
unreadiness for _Illumination_. The desire for self-gratification,
though right and natural to the sense-conscious plane, is yet inimical
to attainment of spiritual consciousness.

There is a spiritual message in the persistently inculcated doctrine
of sacrifice. It is not that a Supreme Being desires sacrifice, or
gifts, or adulation, or homage, or worship, or that any power glories
in our unhappiness. It is not that we may purchase any spiritual thing
by giving up something which we prize, but it is because our spi