orant of the _things_.
Western experience does not coincide with oriental dreams.

Mrs. Besant opens her little volume with the famous story of the
conversion to Christianity of Edwin, but she tells it very loosely, and
in fact wrongly; which is a proof that the infallibility of the Mahatmas
has not fallen upon their disciple. She states that while Paulinus,
the Christian missionary, was speaking to-Edwin of life, death, and
immortality, a bird flew in through a window, circled the hall, and flew
out again into the darkness; whereupon the Christian priest "bade the
king see in the flight of the bird within the-hall the transitory life
of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the soul, in passing
from the' hall of life, winging its way, not in the darkness of night,
but in the sunlit radiance of a more glorious world." Now the bird did
not fly into the hall as Paulinus was speaking, nor did he preach this
sermon upon its movements. It was one of Edwin's suite who introduced
the bird's flight as a metaphor, reminding the king that sometimes at
supper, in the winter, a sparrow would fly in out of the storm, entering
at one door and passing out at another, staying but a minute, and after
that minute returning to winter as from winter it came. "Such is the
life of man," said the Saxon speaker, "and of what follows it, or what
has preceded it, we are altogether ignorant; wherefore, if this new
doctrine should bring anything more certain, it well deserves to be
followed." This is how the incident is related by Bede, though it is
probably apocryphal; nevertheless it ought not to be hashed up by fresh
cooks; and if the matter is in itself of trifling importance, it is as
well to be accurate, especially when you pretend a close acquaintance
with the Masters of Wisdom.

Many hundred years have elapsed since Paulinus talked with Edwin, and
to-day, says Mrs. Besant, there are "more people in Christendom
who question whether a man has a spirit to come anywhence or to go
any-whither, than, perhaps, in the world's history could ever before
have been found at one time." We are also reminded that man has always
been asking whence the soul comes, and whither it goes, and "the answers
have varied with the faiths." _This_ is true, at any rate; but it does
not suggest to Mrs. Besant any lesson of modesty or hesitation. Despite
the discord of so many ages, she is most coolly dogmatic. It does
not, apparently, occur to her to ask _why