To-day there are many, an ever-swelling number, who behold with joy the gates ajar, who standing in the twilight catch momentary glimpses of dawn upon the horizon of time, who know by personal experience that they have come into touch with a region where vast schemes are conceived, and universal laws of boundless magnitude connected with the soul's eternal pilgrimage are carried out.

Again, there are others, timid, shrinking souls to whom, by a mere chance combination of circumstances, a glimpse has been shown which is none too welcome. Such affrighted ones drop the eyelids from the startling vision. They will have none of it, and they are free to accept or reject, go on, or stand still.

Others, again, have actually been born with that super-normal sight which can discern the workings behind the drop scene shrouding the stupendous drama of cosmic government.

I have long been conscious that the veil has worn very thin between myself and another world lying around me. As the years draw swiftly on, and every second thrown back into eternity brings me nearer to blessed deliverance I find the rents in the veil grow more numerous. They bring single shining moments, which reveal the spirit of life, its motives and consecration.

Through the driving storm wrack there will come quite suddenly a brilliant heavenly glimpse. It never lasts long, but long enough to show me reality. Something of the vastness of cosmos and the pathetic minuteness of this earth, just a speck of star dust in the palm of God, an atom of world stuff swinging in boundless space.

Something of the reality of those shining ones who guide the progression of natural order, embodiments of resistless energy and of stateliest imperial mien.

Glimpses that show to me what was in the mind of the great Christian Mystic when he wrote of a mighty angel: "A rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire."

Behind such visions extend vast ranges of being, quite outside my ken, yet, nevertheless, speaking to me of things, for the expression of which no words have yet been coined. Infinitely greater than anything that can be said. Significant in meaning beyond expression, and far transcending imagination.

Such glimpses show to me lives that as compared with ours, are as ours to the tiniest insect afloat for an hour on the breath of the south wind. Lives which ordain the fateful hour when the rise and fall of empires, the destruction of nations, and the clash of worlds, and their cosmic significance in world history shall begin or end. Where things life promised but never gave come to full fruition.

Other glimpses and echoes from the Great Beyond bring to me the answer to a problem, a few notes and a new melody, a new energy of hope and love, an inspiration from the Great Brotherhood, whose lowliest disciple I am, whose work to establish the Brotherhood, the true affinity of humanity upon earth I hold most dear, most high.

In the present dark hour all the world is drinking of one chalice, its wine the life outpoured for others. All humanity is partaking of one bread, a body which has most truly and literally being given to be broken. Death has left many songs unsung, a myriad graves are filled, youth is blighted in the bud, in this white winter men call death, and its cup is pressed close to the lips of love. Many are the hopes that lie folded away in the quiet cemetery of the heart, where we lay flowers of tender reminiscence. Yet, this sacrament of fellowship which is eclipsed in the awful impoverishment of human life will one day be swelled by the return of the young, fallen on the Field of Honor, glorified and purified for their God-appointed work in evolution.

Perhaps I have gone a few steps farther than most people into the mysterious beyond, come nearer reading the great riddle, for the creature who is not afraid of thought and worldly condemnation, who is not afraid of solitude or ridicule, will soon come near the truth, will quickly catch the incommunicable thrill of advancing destinies. She will cease to live under the despotism of days, the tyranny of years. She will know that the swiftest touch cannot put a finger on the present, and that there is but one recorder of time, the great star clock of the sky.

The symbol of life is the Circle, not the Straight line, and each of us lives over again the story of humanity, as in the shadow of pre-natal gloom we repeat the physical evolution of the race. The increase of knowledge but widens the horizon of the unknown promised land, to which we are moving onward and upward throughout the ages.

However far the mind travels there is always deep down in the soul stores of information awaiting transference to the surface of consciousness. Rich mines of knowledge are there awaiting the day when they will be uncovered, waiting in patience the day when some Divine Adventurer will search for them and bring them to light.

However great its aspirations the soul but looks out upon an illimitable horizon, and sees the human pilgrimage as a long EmmÆus walk, with hearts burning by the way. Always must there be mystery in life, because life is spiritual, not material. The presence of mystery in life is the presence of God, and the infinity of God shows that mystery must always exist.

Such glimpses beyond the veil are all transfiguring. They exalt the heart in a single flash to a glow point, and show the soul of the Universe in the incandescent crucible of the eternal. In a deeply beshadowed time such visions tell us all that we need know, and it is this: God is with us and in us. Though obscure for the moment His transcendence stands outside the change and flux of time, and His awful sovereignty sways irresistibly the tides of human circumstances.

Hours must come when the pen falls from the nerveless fingers, the task is left undone, when the weary cry goes up, "There is nothing we can do!" We have been doing for so many thousand years, the years which the locusts hath eaten. What have we achieved?

When such hours come, as come they must, is there nothing to fall back upon but this awful confession of failure, this haunting undertone of all our mortal life that many ages have not hushed?

Surely, yes! There is always for the mystic the unmeasured immensity of soul land to explore, that Great Beyond and within which is infinite, eternal, and of which we are all a part.

Ah! but it may be said, all are not mystics, to which I would reply, all who desire can be mystics. For what, after all, is a mystic, but one who enters into possession of the inner life? One who becomes fully aware of her self-consciousness, and who gains thereby new faculties and enlightenment. It places her in touch with that supreme reality which some call God and some The Great Creative Power. The mystic knows that power is to be found within through identification and submergence with the Primordial Force which constitutes the ocean of life. She can always pass the sky and clouds of earth, and enter the great, deep, real world outside. It is always possible to her to seek a fairer world where the only things that matter are the eternal verities, which should be taken kneeling, like a sacrament.

The Road of the Flaming Sacred Heart is strewn with insight, kindness and sympathy, which gives eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a voice to the dumb! It is paved with love that serves the humble and defends the disinherited. Bravely it walks the Via Dolorosa, and it "Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, its reward to know the love of God, unutterable even to them that know."

The Mystic can face the future without fear, for the power has been given her to take her soul, and like a carrier dove, loose it into space, to speed away into the fathomless, the everlasting, the voiceless deep whose silence is the "Welcome Home" of God.