the heavenly guidance. Ah, to
think of it, those dread deities, the divine Fires, to be so enslaved!
We have not comprehended the meaning of the voice which cried "Prepare
ye the way of the Lord," or this, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates. Be ye
lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in."
Nothing that we read is useful unless it calls up living things in the
soul. To read a mystic book truly is to invoke the powers. If they do
not rise up plumed and radiant, the apparitions of spiritual things,
then is our labor barren. We only encumber the mind with useless
symbols. They knew better ways long ago. "Master of the Green-waving
Planisphere,... Lord of the Azure Expanse,... it is thus we invoke,"
cried the magicians of old.

And us, let us invoke them with joy, let us call upon them with love,
the Light we hail, or the Divine Darkness we worship with silent breath.
That silence cries aloud to the Gods. Then they will approach us. Then
we may learn that speech of many colors, for they will not speak in our
mortal tongue; they will not answer to the names of men. Their names are
rainbow glories. Yet these are mysteries, and they cannot be reasoned
out or argued over. We cannot speak truly of them from report, or
description, or from what another has written. A relation to the thing
in itself alone is our warrant, and this means we must set aside our
intellectual self-sufficiency and await guidance. It will surely come
to those who wait in trust, a glow, a heat in the heart announcing the
awakening of the Fire. And, as it blows with its mystic breath into the
brain, there is a hurtling of visions, a brilliance of lights, a sound
as of great waters vibrant and musical in their flowing, and murmurs
from a single yet multitudinous being. In such a mood, when the far
becomes near, the strange familiar, and the infinite possible, he wrote
from whose words we get the inspiration:

To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the
ceaseless rings
and never be quiet again.

Such a faith and such an unrest be ours: faith which is mistrust of the
visible; unrest which is full of a hidden surety and reliance. We, when
we fall into pleasant places, rest and dream our strength away. Before
every enterprise and adventure of the soul we calculate in fear our
power to do. But remember, "Oh, disciple, in thy work for thy brother
thou hast many allies; in the winds, in the air, in all t