its own being. Then a spiritual tragedy began, infinitely more pathetic
than the old desolation, because it was brought about by the very
nobility of the spirit. This soul, shedding its love like rays of glory,
seemed itself the centre of a ring of wounding spears: it sent forth
love, and the arrowy response came hate-impelled: it whispered peace,
and was answered by the clash of rebellion: and to all this for defense
it could only bare more openly its heart that a profounder love from the
Mother Nature might pass through upon the rest. I knew this was what a
teacher, who wrote long ago, meant when he said: "Put on the whole armor
of God," which is love and endurance, for the truly divine children
of the Flame are not armed otherwise: and of those protests set up in
ignorance or rebellion against the whisper of the wisdom, I saw that
some melted in the fierce and tender heat of the heart, and there came
in their stead a golden response, which made closer the ties, and drew
these souls upward to an understanding and to share in the overshadowing
nature. And this is part of the plan of the Great Alchemist, whereby the
red ruby of the heart is transmuted into the tender light of the opal;
for the beholding of love made bare acts like the flame of the furnace:
and the dissolving passions, through an anguish of remorse, the
lightnings of pain, and through an adoring pity are changed into the
image they contemplate, and melt in the ecstasy of self-forgetful love,
the spirit which lit the thorn-crowned brows which perceived only in
its last agony the retribution due to its tormentors, and cried out,
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Now, although the love of the few may alleviate the hurt due to the
ignorance of the mass, it is not in the power of any one to withstand
for ever this warfare; for by the perpetual wounding of the inner nature
it is so wearied that the spirit must withdraw from a tabernacle grown
too frail to support the increase of light within and the jarring of the
demoniac nature without; and at length comes the call which means, for a
while, release and a deep rest in regions beyond the paradise of lesser
souls. So, withdrawn into the divine darkness, vanished the light of my
dream. And now it seemed as if this wonderful weft of souls intertwining
as one being must come to naught; and all those who through the gloom
had nourished a longing for the light would stretch out hands in vain