ing, and inwardly in a greater fire, which, though it was invisible,
I knew to be the Lamp of the World. This Light which I beheld I felt
to be a human soul, and these perturbations which dimmed it were its
struggles and passionate longings for something, and that was for a more
brilliant shining of the light within itself. It was in love with its
own beauty, enraptured by its own lucidity; and I saw that as these
things were more beloved they grew paler, for this light is the light
which the Mighty Mother has in her heart for her children, and she means
that it shall go through each one unto all, and whoever restrains it in
himself is himself shut out; not that the great heart has ceased in its
love for that soul, but that the soul has shut itself off from influx,
for every imagination of man is the opening or the closing of a door
to the divine world; now he is solitary, cut off, and, seemingly to
himself, on the desert and distant verge of things; and then his thought
throws open the shut portals, he hears the chant of the seraphs in his
heart, and he is made luminous by the lighting of a sudden aureole. This
soul which I watched seemed to have learned at last the secret love;
for, in the anguish begotten by its loss, it followed the departing
glory in penitence to the inmost shrine, where it ceased altogether;
and because it seemed utterly lost and hopeless of attainment and
capriciously denied to the seeker, a profound pity arose in the soul for
those who, like it, were seeking, but still in hope, for they had not
come to the vain end of their endeavors. I understood that such pity
is the last of the precious essences which make up the elixir of
immortality, and when it is poured into the cup it is ready for
drinking. And so it was with this soul which grew brilliant with the
passage of the eternal light through its new purity of self-oblivion,
and joyful in the comprehension of the mystery of the secret love,
which, though it has been declared many times by the greatest of
teachers among men, is yet never known truly unless the Mighty Mother
has herself breathed it in the heart.

And now that the soul has divined this secret, the shadowy shining
which was woven in bonds of union between it and its fellow lights
grew clearer; and a multitude of these strands were, so it seemed,
strengthened and placed in its keeping: along these it was to send the
message of the wisdom and the love which were the secret sweetness of