he higher
consolations.' 'We must,' he writes to those who love him and whom he
labours--with what constant solicitude!--to prepare for the worst, 'we
must attain to this--that no catastrophe whatsoever shall have power to
cripple our lives, to interrupt them, to set them out of tune. . . . Be
happy in this great assurance that I give you--that up till now I have
raised my soul to a height where events have had no empire over it.'
These are heights upon which, beyond the differences of their teachings
and their creeds, all great religious intuitions meet together; upon
which illusions are no more, and the soul rejects the pretensions of
self, in order to accept what _is_. 'Our sufferings come from our small
human patience taking the same direction as our desires, noble though
they may be. . . . Do not dwell upon the personality of those who pass
away and of those who are left; such things are weighed only in the
scales of men. We should gauge in ourselves the enormous value of what
is better and greater than humanity.' In truth, death is impotent
because it too is illusory, and 'nothing is ever lost.' So this young
Frenchman, who has yet never forgone the language of his Christianity,
rediscovers amid the terrors of war the stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius--that virtue which is 'neither patience nor too great
confidence, but a certain faith in the order of all things, a certain
power of saying of each trial, "It is well."' And, even beyond stoicism,
it is the sublime and antique thought of India that he makes his own,
the thought that denies appearances and differences, that reveals to man
his separate self and the universe, and teaches him to say of the one,
'I am not _this_,' and of the other, '_that_, I am.' Wonderful encounter
of thoughts across the distance of ages and the distance of races! The
meditation of this young French soldier, in face of the enemy who is to
attack on the morrow, resumes the strange ecstasy in which was rapt the
warrior of the _Bhagavad Gita_ between two armies coming to the grapple.
He, too, sees the turbulence of mankind as a dream that seems to veil
the higher order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his faith in that
'which knows neither birth nor death,' which is 'not born, is
indestructible, is not slain when this body is slain.' This is the
perpetual life that moves across all the shapes it calls up, striving in
each one to rise nearer to light, to knowledge, and to peace. And that
aim is