the ideal find an ever-increasing
Nirvana of blessedness. Goddess of souls, lead us to imagine
higher and holier exaltations; keener and more blessed
raptures!

PRIESTESSES.

Sweet mother of souls! teach us to cultivate consoling
friendships with sympathetic hearts. Give us longings for
the utmost depths of love and tenderness; let us possess
fervid and impassioned souls.

PRIESTS.

Let us create a paradise wherein life is one long
intoxication of love, beauty and soul-culture, found in the
fascinating converse of soul with soul and intellect with
intellect.

PRIESTESSES.

May rapturous energies spring from hopeless loves! May the
yearning for inaccessible pleasures fill us with blessed
extravagance and holy madness.

PRIESTS.

May we, firmly poised on virtue, become possessed of noble,
delicate, enormous souls. May the meeting of spirit with
spirit be too ecstatic for words to express. May vows be
written in each other's hearts. May the jewelled ring bind
soul and soul, and in the commingled life may the holy
compact be known, that a perfect circle of souls has been
consummated.

PRIESTESSES.

Secure by our compact and our vows from tasting of the
forbidden fruit, may we always possess the happy
intemperance of never-satiated souls.

PRIESTS.

May the sorcery of love procure for us the shuddering
sensibility of sorrow, without its agony, as we possess the
perfect delight of day without the cold and lugubrious
shadows of the night.

PRIESTESSES.

Contact with life begets love, and love begets sensation,
and sensation desire, but reason and culture control desire
and so preserve the endless sweetness of our joy.

PRIESTS.

The real mortal, the ideal divine. The real awakens desire,
the ideal feeds it. The real is the maimed, the halt and the
blind; it is the sepulchre of faith; the poor, the tawdry,
the miserable, it is the measure of our imperfect attainment
of the ideal.

The ideal is the supreme made possible by love and charity.
It is wide as imagination, perfect as love, calm as death.
It is the unchan