My First Meeting with H. P. Blavatsky's Teacher
Reincarnation: The Doctrine of Sublime Hope
All waits or goes by default till a strong being appears;
A strong being is the proof of the race and of the
ability of the universe,
When he or she appears materials are overaw'd,
The dispute on the soul stops,
The old customs and phrases are confronted,
turn'd back, or laid away. — WALT WHITMAN, "Song of the Broad-Axe"
It is because we build our hopes, such as they are, not on knowledge but on faith — on blind faith and, at that, faith in a personality and powers outside of ourselves — that we have drifted away so pitiably from the inspiration and beautiful philosophy of nature, who with her stars and all her hierarchies of beauty could reveal to us the wonderful doctrine, if we would turn and heed.
I remember very vividly the morning I met H. P. Blavatsky's teacher on the mountainside near Darjiling. He was dressed plainly in the Tibetan style, and had an English pocketknife in his hand and was whittling a piece of wood with it. In the field below, not far away, a young Hindu was plowing with a brace of oxen; and the whittling, he told me, was to make a little plug or peg which, inserted in the yoke, would make it easier for the beasts. He drew my attention to the plowman, one of his own chelas he said.
"Were a battery of guns firing and the shells falling all around him," said the Teacher, "he would not stir from his work. Indeed, he would hardly be aware of the noise or the peril, so absorbed he is. Those two oxen with anyone else are most unmanageable creatures; with him they are always, as now, perfectly quiet. He does not control them with his will; his mind does not concern itself with them at all. But you see there for yourself proof that those dumb things can feel the atmosphere of purity of thought.
"And when he goes upon a pilgrimage, he will travel more miles in a day than any of the others and come in far ahead. You know how the women here in India lave and anoint the feet of the pilgrims? Well, his feet after the longest day's journey have never been found hurt or damaged by the road. Why? Because he never dreads or even thinks of the distance, but goes on his way happily; and it never occurs to him to be troubled as to whether or not he may have missed the road or taken the wrong turning or the like. His mind is so buoyant with the joy of the spiritual life that it actually lightens his body for him.
"You know, the atoms of the human body become weighed down as a rule with the burdens of the mind — the irrelevant ideas, the preoccupations and anxieties. They go through series of changes momently, affected by the thoughts of the brain-mind. The lack of trust, the lack of inspiration that people suffer from — the hopelessness — bring these atoms down halfway to death. But they can be quickened to a kind of immortality by the fire of the divine life and attuned into universal harmony. Men anywhere could get rid of all that burden of unnecessities, and carry themselves like that young chela does, if they had the mental balance.
"If you had to go from here to America," he continued, "you would not sit still and dream about the place you wanted to go to, and think that was enough. The trouble with some theosophical aspirants is that they waste the strength of their lives looking at the goal ahead, rather than at the immediate moments and seconds of which the Path is composed, and so their better selves become exhausted. They should let the beaming thought pour itself into each arriving moment and be indifferent to the morrow. One can find in every instant of time, if one has the desire, the door into worlds of golden opportunity, the gateway to a glorious path stretching out into the limitless eternal. . . .
"To move away from the material plane of effort and thought and personality — that is what the soul is urging us to do: to move out into the hidden vast realities of life and understand that within and above and around us, and in the very atmosphere in which our thoughts and feelings exist, universal life is pulsating continuously in response to our yearnings and questionings. When people say that they are seeking happiness, they mean that they are aiming at that stage in their evolution where their present problems will be solved. To reach it, one must withdraw from the allurements of life and all its outward and discouraging aspects, and find himself in the solitude of his own being, in a silence unbreakable within his own heart and mind.
"The outer life is transient: he must gain the inner power and live in the spirit which is eternal. He cannot step free-souled into that light without having learned concentration, which many these days advertise they can teach, and lecture on it, forming cults, holding classes, and taking dollars. But all they can do at last is to lead their victims away from reality and farther and farther away from the true self within themselves. For concentration is a power inherent in the self and above and beyond the mind: it cannot be found in the objective world, for it is not there. The kingdom of heaven is on earth, and the gates of it are to be sought and discovered in the heart of man.
"So the aspirant should not think about the cultivation of powers, but live in the light and strength of his own higher nature. The divine law is in every man and woman, and each must find it there for himself and make it manifest in his life. No one can pour pure water into foul so that it shall still retain its purity. Selflessness attains, selfishness defeats: men's possibilities are in direct proportion to their ability to see beyond themselves and to feel for others. . . .
"To throw the mind, on moving out of sleep into waking, directly upon the outward things is to lose half the life of the day. One should awake in the morning with a beautiful thought, reminding himself that the battle for the day is before him and that the god within desires a moment's conference with the mind before the arduous duties of the morning begin.
"He should find something in the silence and sunlight of the first hours which should link itself with his own higher nature and bring forth the blossom and the fruit. He should free himself in the morning in the sweetness of the sunlight, beginning the day as gently as though he were waking a little child from its slumbers, bringing forward the truer and nobler side of himself — I do not mean working it out in words and language, but in thought approaching the richness and fullness of the spirit and letting the god within blossom into each moment as it rises. Then, reaching out for the most difficult duty that one knows to be one's duty and overcoming it, he will learn the secret of being on guard, and in a little while have thrown away unawares all the burdens that obstructed him. Many have been working hard and conscientiously to get rid of these burdens: there is no need to spend a moment on them. It is but to put aside the doubts and misgivings, to enter the chambers of the soul, to bask in the sunlight and strength that are there.
"The first three hours of the day," he continued, "are the great opportunity. He who does not rise with the sun loses an immense amount of power. He who rises before the sun, and by daybreak has finished with the duties of this plane and what may be necessary for the care of the body and is ready to step out with the sunrise and work with the sun, he has the cooperation of a force he little knows of — the vibrant blue light behind the sun.
"The trouble is with many of our aspirants that too often they begin with the letter and go backwards in search of the spirit. But let them hold to these things in the silence and create a noble future in their hearts, going alone in the morning into the silence of nature. Freeing themselves there from their old trying memories and from all anticipations of trouble, let them make themselves at one with that light in nature. And it will not hurt them to look at the stars with wonder occasionally, or to listen with delight to the music of the birds, or to spend whole days in silence, brooding on these sacred things whilst performing all the duties that come to them to do."
I think he placed a talisman in our hands, and gave us the real secret of life.
When the conquest of self is made, the whole aspect of the universe changes. We move with divine affection close to the Mighty Mother and realize that all these years the silence and the stars in heaven have been pleading with us, and that for us the trees have put forth their leaves and all the flowers their blossoms, and that every bird that sang, sang for us, and that for our sake all beauty has been.
I recall how Carlyle after years of doubt came to a place in his life where the whole world seemed dead to him, and he could find no answer to his questions in books or in his Calvinistic religion. Then one morning, as hungering after truth he looked out over the hilltops, it came to him: in the glory of the morning light above the mountains he realized the power and grandeur within nature, whose secret beauty was reflected into his soul. He found the divinity within him and the truth and message he afterwards wrote so brilliantly for the world, a message of perfect trust in the divineness of the universe and man.
And this revelation is awaiting us all, for the Infinite is in everything and all things are expressions of the spirit. The invisible forces lying behind external nature are identical with the invisible forces working through ourselves, and in both are many hidden things we have not discovered and do not understand. The spirit that shines through the beauty of dawns and sunsets seeks equally to express its grandeur and dignity through our human lives. The spiritual will that urges us towards noble and righteous living is a part of the same great essence that breathes through all nature, expressing itself in the hue and perfume of the flowers, in the whisper or crying of the wind, in all the music of the wild waters and the rolling billows of the sea.
In the search for freedom, in the quest for sublime perfection, there is eternal alliance between man and nature. The waves and winds can shout for us the battle cry or sing for us the song of our peace or whisper to us their dreams of sunlit ages to be. Under the blue of heaven in the free air we can always find that which is akin and most intimate to ourselves, and a friendliness in every green and growing thing, and the new life, which is the god-essence, everywhere. It is in the plan of evolution that we should enjoy this noble silent companionship and that all nature should constantly appeal to and invoke that which is impersonal, and therefore godlike, in ourselves.
Go into the secret chambers of your heart, go out under the magnificence of the constellations, arise to the viewpoint of the godhead you shall find in both, and the stars themselves will bring forth new manifestations of wonder for you. You shall know certainly that where life is, in that place is the divine, and that the glory of the sky and the sweet silence of the air, the wonder of music, the richness and vitality of color — all these things are but manifestations and permutations of impersonal deity.
You cannot think of a beautiful line of poetry without awakening in some degree that divine inner glory within yourself. You can read such a line again and again until after a while you have lost sight of your surroundings and are out in an ideal world all beauty and sublimity — the trouble with us is that we never remain there long enough to find out who we are. We do not catch the undertones of the silence there; we are in too much hurry to return.
Seek the upward and ennobling path and you are no longer alone: your own divinity is on your side with you and what you can encompass of what universal nature affords is with you to support you towards final victory. For music you shall have hearing of the symphony of life and the stars in their courses shall sing to you, the trees shall chant to you the hymn of their beautiful being, and all nature shall greet you with the salutation of respect because of the noble effort you are making. The glory of death shall be made known to you, and you shall know the path you must travel though you may not foresee the goal, for the soul shall implant in your mind knowledge of its high possibilities. But he who chooses the downward path and uses his energies on behalf of the evil in him has at his elbow likewise the evil of the world.
I remember how the wonder and power of theosophy were born in upon me on my first visit to Egypt. There the footsteps of the ancient times are visible, and the truth men lived and brooded of old endures still and cannot die. In the clear motionless air, in the mountains and old temples, there is a silence and an impress of ages gone which awaken the imagination. One feels the presence and potency of the truths that shone through the Mysteries of old, and that the great hierophants and teachers have left the touch of their inner lives in the atmosphere. Those silent hills, worn with age — how they spoke to me! They were full of the mightiness of ancient times and the spiritual activities of the great Egyptians. The old Nile talked to me, and the moon above the Nile, until I knew that the greatest and most eloquent power in nature as well as in human life is silence.
It was borne in upon me in the tombs of the pharaohs. I remember the day when we rode from Luxor along the bank of the river, and up over hills and down through ravines, and then walked through a door in the hillside and by galleries and galleries underground, and by flights of stairs carved in the rock, into a room lit with electricity — the tomb of Seti I. The mummy was there: the lid of the sarcophagus had been removed and the lights were disposed so that one could see the great king's features. I had never before understood why they mummified their dead, but as we went in there and looked at the face of that mighty monarch — he was one of the very greatest of the pharaohs — a silence seemed to descend upon the whole party: an inner and majestic silence which was in itself a symphony of symphonies, as if we had been ushered into the presence of something that still remained, and was in its essence imperishable, of that long-dead ruler's greatness.
There were many periods, anciently, when the soul was better understood than it is now — when men fashioned their lives simply and beautifully in accordance with the magnificent aspirations of nature; when they listened for and heard, as we do but very rarely, the melody of life which is the voice of the inner divinity; when they talked with the stars and had no fear written on their faces; when they knew no dogmas at all, nor fear of death, nor spiritual nor moral terror. All that was best in the history of those early races is here now in the very atmosphere in which we live. It is not lost; it is in nature. It has made itself a part of the harmony of universal life.
In such periods, wise teachers instituted the festival of Easter in honor of the Mighty Mother. They knew that the depths and powers hidden in nature and in man are infinite, and paying tribute to the beauty and glory of the universe invoked at the same time the infinite divine beauty in themselves and in the general human heart. For there is that undertone in life: it is in all of us and we are bound together by it inescapably, each his brother's keeper, though it is audible only to him who is great enough to hear it because he has found his true self.
Knowing this, and that the divine essence is everywhere, those wise ones of old time knew that through our own efforts we may lift the veil and understand the mysteries of being and the whole meaning of the conflict within ourselves, and so work out our own salvation; that he who will crucify his earthly passions will find strength to roll back the stone from the doorway of his own inner being wherein the divinity lies entombed, raising as it were the Christos from the dead; and that this is the resurrection and the life. And they instituted and ordained Easter in commemoration of it.
How joyful, how sublime, our existence in this world becomes when viewed from this standpoint, and with the key to all its mysteries — which is knowledge of the essential divinity of man — in one's possession! In the sunshine of that wisdom all the thoughts that we cling to and love because of their fineness will blossom; and the small aims and prejudices of our minds and the conventional opinions we accept without thought as to whether they bear any relation to truth or not — how infinitely trivial they will seem. We have limited Deity according to the measure of our own minds and conceived of the limitless as personal because we have been oblivious of all but the personal within ourselves. Yet that self-knowledge for lack of which we suffer can be attained, and it is a consciousness of the regal powers of the soul.
No man can make his own divine potentialities actual until he has recognized the universality of the divine and asserted its presence within himself, aware that by will and conviction he can make manifest in his human life every quality and aspect of Godhead. One has not to run away from present duty in order to find this knowledge, but in the inmost spaces of the heart is the throbbing life of the divine wherein all wisdom is discoverable because it is there that all wisdom inheres.
Let a man work with nature, understanding her fundamental laws and living by them: knowing what she demands of him and building his life on the knowledge. Unsatisfied with the personal God idea, let him know that God is the divine life unfolding itself through the power of its own essence: the one universal law inspiring, flowing through, directing the infinite interweaving of laws that express themselves through life and govern its manifestations. And in the performance of every smallest duty, in the bearing of every sorrow, in the conduct of his severest and most discouraging struggles, that divine force, that knowledge, seeking its expression in the transformations, will be at his hand. For it is a power whose secret is in the heart and mind and soul working together, and is to be evoked only out of the hidden realms within ourselves where all the splendor at the heart of life is to be found.
He who finds it within himself, and knows it wonderfully to be himself and the sole reality in himself, lives absolutely for humanity, because to touch human nature at any point is to touch the whole of humanity, and to evoke the god-self within ourselves is to employ the power underlying all things. This is the reason why no one now is quite at ease within himself or wholly satisfied: the ray of the divine nature in each of us is eager after self-expression in a larger life than any we have dreamed of. We are not brought into existence by chance nor thrown up into earth-life like wreckage cast along the shore, but are here for infinitely noble purposes.
All humanity should know its heritage, constantly striving to become and overcome, yet never depending on forces outside of self. Rising in the morning, we should be conscious of the divinity within; retiring at night, we should be enfolded in the protection of the law. For none of us is overlooked, left out, or forgotten in this scheme of life of whose sweeping beneficence each is a part. In all situations from the most trivial to the most important, in all temptations from the smallest to the largest, a man can find in his own reflections and inner consciousness that which will convince him that he is more than he seems — a knowledge that leads not to egoism or self-importance, but to great simplicity, impersonality, and balance.
For man is the soul, and there is no wisdom so divine that he cannot attain it: the soul belongs to the beautiful eternities and we are here to make all existence beautiful. Life would have nothing in it for me, I could not live through a day of it, were it not for the consciousness within that this apologetic bit of myself is the temple of the soul, the shrine of a god ever pressing towards grander expressions of life. The soul can rest on nothing this side of Infinity: it loses its vitality if it seeks to do so. All eternity awaits it; how should it be satisfied with the half-life we live and the many imperfections that mar us? The nature of the soul is to be winging its flight forever towards the boundless; to be working, hoping, and conquering; to be going forward forever and ever.
It is therefore no question of our likes and dislikes: advance we must, seeking within ourselves the secret of our god-selves which sing to us eternally through the silence. If the meaning and the music of the song be lost before it reaches our hearing, it is because our thoughts are too full of the things of death and because we are weighed down by needless burdens and grow old in our youth with wrong thinking, filling our minds with desires that emanate from selfishness and allowing them to accumulate until they, and not we, become the living force behind our actions.
It is not only the mind but the whole being that must be prepared for the search for truth. And for this there are no rules that can be given, no precise directions nor yardstick recipes. But conceive, if but for a day, that you are greater than ever you dreamed you were, that in the essence of your nature you are divine and cannot suffer perdition; and remember that you never could have walked if you had not tried, that you never could have spoken if you had not made the effort to speak, that you never could have sung if you had not felt within you the urge of the living god there.
Theosophy is as old as the hills and all the world religions are based on its teachings, although only a minority now are familiar with them. It is not superstition nor speculation, not dogmatism nor blind faith nor the product of the brain-mind of any man, nor yet miraculous. It comes to humanity like an old traveler who has trodden all the highways of experience and, having achieved after long journeying a full understanding of life, returns to the place from which he started that he may bring to those who dwell there the saving knowledge he has acquired. And it is knowledge of the god within man and of man's power to advance and to overcome, which is what evolution means.
Superficial examination of its teachings will avail nothing. As none could become a musician by mere study of the theory of music, so none can come to an understanding of theosophy by reading of it in books. In both cases practice is needed: one must live the life if one would know the law. An artist never attained excellence in his art nor a musician in his music who did not begin with the basic principles.
Where there is satisfaction with self, there look for danger because there no growth can take place. A certain conflict within, of thought and feeling, must be going forward, until we arrive at some knowledge of our own — at some perception of life's meaning and purposes, of our origin and destiny, our duties, obligations, and responsibilities.
No man can really grow until he has trust in himself. The successful inventor is the one who realizes that there is something more to know, that new knowledge is always accessible and waiting for him, that tomorrow will add to what he has today. He was once a boy, playing with his tools clumsily and with no knowledge of mechanics, but after a time some inner whispering told him that he was to achieve something. He kept on because that which bade him keep on was above and beyond his mind, until he came to be aware that his mentality was but an aid to him in the working out of his problems and that there is an inside something that uses it, discovering truth and acquiring knowledge, and that this is the real man who may be inspired by illuminating ideas out of the universal mind or may have brought them with him as memories out of ancient lives.
He looks always for truth beyond his opinions and goes out seeking into the broad spheres of thought. He frees his mind and advances, hoping and trusting. He visualizes his aims and believes there are whole regions in his nature which he has not yet discovered and, relying on that undeveloped side of himself, claims from it by trust the knowledge he seeks, and does not claim in vain.
So too the real artist, the lover of truth and beauty, is lifted in his moments of creation above all brain-mind limitations and carried on to a plane that transcends our normal thought-life, and feels there, throbbing and thrilling through his being, the poetry and inspiration of the great silence — that divine light that is within and a part of us all and forever awaiting our recognition. Such a one, artist or inventor, when he is in quest of that which should do good to the world, sounding the deep resources of his nature, touches the fringe of worlds more wonderful, and strangely mysterious powers. Whereas another man, with equal latent ability, approaching the same problems with doubt and hesitation, or again with presumptuous self-sufficiency, would be very sure not to succeed. In proportion as a man worships the outer, he misses the inner truth.
Many who have abandoned belief in a personal God and the other vanities and subtleties of sectarian metaphysics, and are thinking seriously — in the depression the unrest of the age is causing in them — of life and its many problems, have found in the teaching of reincarnation that which makes clear the meaning of it all. For here is explanation of the differences of human fortune, so that they cease to seem unjust and intolerable; and here man is revealed in the splendor of his native godhood, a traveler through eternity, moving from life to life, gaining by experience after experience that knowledge which will make of him at last the ideal, the perfect man.
We are of the family of the eternal; we are the highest expressions that we know of, of universal Deity. Are we to think that the experience to which we have a right can be gained in the few score fleeting years of a single lifetime, before these bodies of ours cease to be useful and drop away following the laws of physical life and return to the storehouse of nature? The material things have their place, but the essential and everlasting things are in the eternal self. They are the attributes and faculties of the soul, and these are what we are here to develop, working in harmony with the mighty and compassionate heart of nature.
Could a soul filled with the melody and splendid influx of music fulfill itself even in the longest period that could elapse between its body's birth and death? A man who has no musical heredity or inclination that he knows of may find himself sometime startled into listening, and stirred; and listening longer, and stirred more deeply; and still pausing and listening, overwhelmed by it at last so that silent and wonderful currents of vibration and feeling are started within him. Perhaps he is a mechanic in a shop or caught in the grind of commercial life with neither time nor energy to spare for music — it does not matter: that divine thing has touched him, and it may be that lying within his nature are the potentialities of a great musician. Must they not come out in time and be expressed? A promise of eternal progress is stamped upon all human hearts; everything in nature proclaims it. Why should we not have the same trust in our essential divinity that the flowers have in the beneficence of the sun?
To what purpose are the ideals we cherish unspoken; the secret, noble, and unfulfilled aspirations; the questions we put to life, and to which our present life makes no answer? To what end are the agonies and despairs, the unrest and intense longing to be so much more than we can ever attain to being now, before death takes us? Were they born in a day — these thoughts of ours that stir us sometimes almost to the point of revelation? Were they fashioned of the experience we have gathered in the few years since our bodies were born?
Their word to us is always that we are greater than we seem, that there are no limits to the power of the soul, that though our understanding of this beautiful universe will go on increasing forever and ever we shall never attain a dead finality of understanding, that we have all eternity in which to work out the magnificence of the law and that there is no break in the everlasting continuity, that one may falter today and fail but tomorrow brings another chance, that we live many lives, again and again the same in essence though different in aspect — we immortal beings, natives of eternity made subject here to mortality and time.
Few, whether religious or not, go out satisfied into the great unknown and into that sleep which is not sleep in the sense of inertia, but a sleep in activity and a divine activity in sleep. No matter how noble a man's life may have been, is it possible to think of it as having reached that sublimity of perfection in one single lifetime that would find its true expression in an eternity of bliss? How much more reasonable to believe that we live again and again, traveling the path of the ages with opportunity after opportunity always recurring, than to imagine ourselves the poor creatures of a single life, created at our birth out of nothing and at death to be relegated to an eternal heaven or an unending hell, in neither of which progress is possible nor opportunities are to be found, nor any goal lies ahead nor hope exists for inspiration and incentive.
Could a soul that was really noble accept peace for itself and find happiness in heaven whilst here on earth humanity is still aching and in chains and sorrow? The soul holds within itself the attributes of Deity: it is all made up of compassion, justice, abnegation. What delight then, what self-expression, could it find in such selfish bliss? Were a man come into the fullness of his soul — to be wholly that divine thing — he could not endure the thought. His will would be set on returning to earth, to share in human suffering and point the way for the unfortunate to that self-knowledge which brings peace. He would work forever and ever for the glory of the divine, for the glory of the god innate in man, aware that because of the divinity within us we have the power to shape all human destiny towards perfection. I tell you, the god within us awaits!
To the blind beggar by the roadside, what a song in his heart knowledge of reincarnation would be. Then first he would understand that a bright future and high achievements might be awaiting him; his fate would no longer appear something mysterious and terrible for which he could never be compensated — no longer some punishment afflicted upon him by an omnipotent and vindictive power, but a ministration of the law that fashions from suffering godlike destinies for men, apportioned to him that he might build up his character for a more royal birth. He would understand that there was hope for him, that all his darkness would be made clear, that a day would come when his inner longings would be much more than mere unattainable aspirations, that he might then and there be preparing noble fortunes for himself. The gods await!
Life is not cruel. There is no injustice in it. In the light of reincarnation, the sufferings we considered unjust lose the sting of their supposed injustice and become easy to endure. We come to look on them as blessings because means of liberation and our chief incentives to growth. Experience and pain are our teachers. We are reminded constantly by the difficulties we have to overcome of the majestic mercy of the law.
Life exists only for service: we live in order that we may serve. Hold to that idea in your hour of trouble and you will accept your difficulties graciously, as a gift graciously given. You will not think of them as pangs and burdens to be endured, but as beautiful fires to purify and set free. Not that one should be humble in the ordinary sense; we should hold our heads high — there is altogether too much of the other thing. We are quite too submissive to our own weaknesses. If you have strived with your whole soul and with a trust impossible to break, and still the thought is forced upon you that your position has not changed nor your stumbling block been removed; if you find yourself compelled to say, "Though I have lifted myself up toward my ideals and approached the divine within me daily, I am not set free," take courage yet again; it is the time to do so. The thing you have struggled against in vain may become a blessing. It may be the very saving power in your life, holding you back in the place where alone you could learn the lesson you most need to learn.
Thus, though our minds have been under serious shadows, adversity should but leave us with the solution of our problems, teaching us the secret of readjusting our lives because it is the aspirations of our own souls that kindle the fires in which we are tried, and we may find a glory in suffering, disappointment, and heartache and understand the sublime comfort of the change called death.
If the errors of the past did not produce their results that we might learn from them the lessons they are to teach — if life were without struggle, work, and effort — we should be things on the face of the earth and not souls as we are. Only by means of these can we draw near to truth and gain a sense of the largeness of life, of eternity, of the augustness of the laws that hold us in their keeping. Only so can we find the way to live the real life which is altogether cheerful, optimistic, radiant with generous affection; the life that sees no terminus in the grave nor any limit to its vistas in birth or death.
Thus reincarnation gives us room and time to grow, as nature provides soil and season for the flowers — to grow and to learn what life and the world can teach us and to acquire use of the godlike qualities of our inner selves and the light hidden within the soul of man which alone can illumine the path we must tread and enable us to solve the stern and awful problems, the pathetic problems, life so unceasingly sets before us, and to know its unspeakable beauties as well.
We advance from age to age and from heights to greater heights forever. Understanding this, the old become young again in spirit and the young look out on the world with a new joy. The days are long and the path is wide: go forward, then, with farseeing hope and trust, towards the great ultimate. The gods await!