EVIL can so
retrograde the progress of any spiritual life within him, that it shall
lack the power to escape, as it might do, from merely lymphatic and
listless temperaments, to seek some other chance of development, but
shall sink into the form of quadrupeds, birds, and other creatures
dominated by purely physical needs. But there is one thing it can never
escape from--MEMORY. And in that faculty is constituted Hell. So that
if a man, by choice, forces his soul DOWNWARD to inhabit hereafter the
bodies of dogs, horses, and other like animals, he should know that he
does so at the cost of everything except Remembrance. Eternal
Retrogression means that the hopelessly tainted electric germ recoils
further and further from the Pure Centre whence it sprang, ALWAYS
BEARING WITHIN ITSELF the knowledge of WHAT IT WAS ONCE and WHAT IT
MIGHT HAVE BEEN. There is a pathetic meaning in the eyes of a dog or a
seal; in the melancholy, patient gaze of the oxen toiling at the
plough; there is an unuttered warning in the silent faces of flowers;
there is more tenderness of regret in the voice of the nightingale than
love; and in the wild upward soaring of the lark, with its throat full
of passionate, shouting prayer, there is shadowed forth the yearning
hope that dies away in despair as the bird sinks to earth again, his
instincts not half satisfied. There is no greater torture than to be
compelled to remember, in suffering, joys and glorious opportunities
gone for ever.

"Regarding the Electric Theory of Religion, it is curious to observe
how the truth of it has again and again been dimly shadowed forth in
the prophecies of Art, Science, and Poesy. The old painters who
depicted a halo of light round the head of their Virgins and Saints did
so out of a correct impulse which they did not hesitate to obey.
[Footnote: An impulse which led them vaguely to foresee, though, not to
explain, the electric principle of spiritual life.] The astronomers
who, after years of profound study, have been enabled to measure the
flames of the burning sun, and to find out that these are from two to
four thousand miles high, are nearly arrived at the conclusion that it
is a world in a state of conflagration, in which they will be perfectly
right. Those who hold that this Earth of ours was once self-luminous
are also right; for it was indeed so when first projected from the
Electric Ring. The compilers or inventors of the 'Arabian Nights' also
hit upon a trut