Collected Works (Vol. III)

224 EPILOGUE AND DEDICATION aloud, expectant of some great and mysterious result. I pledge myself, if you have a spark of religion in you, that is, if you are properly a human being, that you will (at the very least) experience a deeper sense of spiritual communion than youghave ever obtained by any course of church-going. After which you will, if you are worth your salt, devote your life to the development of this communion, and to the search for an instructed master who can tell you more than I can. Now the earlier paganism is simply over- flowing with this spirit of communion. The boy goes down to the pool, musing, as boys will; is it strange that a nymph should reward him, sometimes even with wine from the purple vats of death? Poor dullards! in your zeal to extinguish the light upon our altars you have had to drench your own with the bitter waters of test of faith to utter either a lie or a jest, this with reverence, and that with conviction, Achieve it; the one becomes the truth, the other a formula of power. Hence the real value of the Egyptian ritual by which the theurgist identified himself with the power he invoked. Modern neophytes should not (we think) use the old conjurations with their barbarous names, because, imperfectly un- derstanding the same, they may supersti- tiously attribute some real power to them; we shall rather advise ‘‘ Jack and Jill went up the hill,” ‘‘From Greenland's icy moun- tains,’ and such, with which it is impossible for the normal mind to associate a feeling of reverence. What may be the mode of operation of this formula concerns us little; enough if it succeeds. But one may suggest that it is a case of the will running free, z.e. un- checked, as it normally is, by the hosts of critical larvae we call reason, habit, sensation, and the like. But the will freed from these may run straight and swift; if its habitual goal has been the attainment of Samadhi, it may under such circumstances reach it. It will require a very advanced student to use this type of faith. The Lord's Prayer and the minor exaltation are the certainties for this event.—A, C. most general unbelief. Where are the witches and the fairies and the angels, and the visions of divine St. John? You are annoyed at my mention of angels and witches; because you know yourselves to be sceptics, and that I have any amount of ‘‘scriptural warrant” to throw at your heads, if I deigned; you are all embar- rassed when Maude Adams Jeans over the footlights with a goo-goo accent so ex- cessive that you die of diabetes in a week, and asks you point-blank: ‘‘ Do you believe in fairies?’’ while, for your visions, you do not go to St. John’s Island, and share his exile; but to his Wood, and waste your money. The early pagan worships Demeter in dim groves: there is silence; there is no organisation of ritual; there the worship is spontaneous and individual. In short, the work of religion is thrown upon the religious faculty, instead of being dele- gated to the quite inferior and irrelevant faculties of mere decorum or even stage- craft. A Christian of the type of Brown- ing understands this perfectly, True, he approves the sincerity which he finds to pervade the otherwise disgusting chapel; but he cares nothing whatever for the ‘Sraree-show of Peter’s successor,” and though I daresay his ghost will be shocked and annoyed by my mention of the fact, Browning himself does not get his illumi- nation in any human temple, but only when he is out with the universe alone in the storm. Nor does Browning anywhere draw so perfect and so credible a picture of the inter- course between man and God as the exquisite vision of Pan in ‘* Pheidippides.” It is all perfectly natural and therefore miraculous; there is no straining at the gnats of vestment in the hope of swallowing the camel of Illumination. In the matter of Pentecost, we hear only, in the way of the ‘conditions of the experiment,” that ‘‘they were all with one accord in one place.” Now, this being