CHAPTER II.

"Quæ surgere regnaConjugio tali!"

and I felt with Tennyson that

"They two together well might move the world."

So boundless seemed to me the kingdoms of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty which would spring from such conjunction.

It goes without saying that such relationship was contemplated by me only as the accompaniment of a happy re-marriage. [For I had married in Australia only to be widowered after a year's wedlock.] But such a prospect was so long withheld as to make me dubious of its realisation[14]. Nevertheless, some inner voice was ever saying: "Wait; wait. Everything comes to him who waits, provided only he do so in faith and patience, looking to the highest." But that I did wait, and accordingly kept myself free for what ultimately was assigned to me, was due far less to the expectation of finding that for which I waited, than to the vivid consciousness which I had of the bitterness that would come of finding it, only to be withheld from it through a previous disposal of myself in some other and incompatible quarter. This was an impression which served largely to keep my life as free as I desired my thought to be. But that the as yet undisclosed arbiters of my destiny deemed it insufficient as a deterrent, appeared from their reinforcement of it in a manner which effectually debarred me from marriage save on the condition, impossible to me, of a mercenary alliance. This was a reversal of fortune through a succession of losses so serious as to be the cause of reducing my means to the minimum compatible with existence at all in my own station, which soon afterwards happened. That there were yet further reasons for this imposition on me of the rule of poverty, arising out of the nature of the work required of me, was in due time made manifest, and also what those reasons were. They need not be specified here, excepting only this one. It madeimpossible the ascription to my destined colleague of mercenary motives for her association with me. In this I came to recognise a delicate providence for which I felt I could not be too thankful. In the meantime, even while smarting severely from this dispensation, and others yet more bitter which were heaped on me for no apparent cause or fault of my own that I could discern, the thought that most of all served to sustain me under what I felt would have utterly broken down in heart or head, or in both of these organs, any other person whatever of whom I had knowledge,—that thought was the surmise or suspicion that all these things, hard to bear as they were, and undeserved as they seemed, might prove to be blessings in disguise, in ministering to the realisation of the controlling ambition of my life by educating me for it; and that according to the manner in which I bore them might be the result.

There is yet one more personal disclosure essential to this part of my relation. It concerns my own mental standpoint at the time at which my narrative has arrived. Bent as I was on penetrating the secret of things at first hand, and by means of a thought absolutely free, I was never for a moment disposed to turn, as my so-called free-thinking contemporaries one and all had turned, a scornful back upon whatever related to or savoured of the current religion. Scripture and dogma were not for me necessarily either false or inscrutable because their official exponents had presented them in an aspect which outraged my reason and revolted my conscience. I felt bound—if only in justice to them and myself—at least to find out what they did mean before finally discarding them. And in this act of justice I was strangely sustained by a sense of the possibility that the truth, if any, contained in them, was no other than that of which I was in search. This is to say, that in all my investigations I kept before me the idea that, if I could discern the actual nature of existence and the intended sense of the Bible and Christianity, independently of each other, they might prove on comparison to be identical; in which case the latter would really represent a true revelation. Meanwhile, I found myself constrained to believe, as an axiomatic proposition, that the higher and nobler the conception I framed in my imagination of the nature of existence, and the more in accordance with my ideas of what, to be perfect, the constitution of the universe ought to be, the nearer I should come to the actual truth.

Similarly with religion. For a religion to be true, it must, I felt absolutely assured, be ideally perfect after the most perfect ideal that we can frame. This is to say, that not only must it be in itself such as to satisfy both head and heart, mind and moral conscience, spirit and soul; it must also be perfectly simple, obviously reasonable, coherent, self-evident, founded in the nature of things, incapable—when once comprehended—of being conceived of as otherwise, absolutely equitable, eternally true, and recognisable as being all these, invariable in operation, independent of all accidents of time, place, persons and events, and comparable to the demonstration of a mathematical problem in that it needs no testimony or authority beyond those of the mind; and requiring for its efficacious observance, nothing that is extraneousor inaccessible to the subject-individual, but within his ability to recognise and fulfil, provided only that he so will. It must also be such as to enable him by the observance of it to turn his existence to the highest possible account imaginable by him, be his imagination as developed as it may: and all this as independently of any being other than himself, as if he were the sole personal entity in the universe, and were himself the universe. That is to say, the means of a man's perfectionment must inhere in his own system, and he must be competent of himself effectually to apply them. It is further necessary, because equitable, that he be allowed sufficient time and opportunity for the discovery, understanding and application of such means.

Such are the terms and conditions of an ideally perfect religion, as I conceived of them. It is a definition which excludes well-nigh, if not quite, all the characteristics ordinarily regarded as appertaining to religion, and notably to that of Christendom. For in excluding everything extraneous to the actual subject-individual, and requiring religion to be self-evident and necessarily true, it excludes as superfluous and irrelevant, history, tradition, authority, revelation, as ordinarily conceived of, ecclesiastical ordinance, priestly ministration, mediatorial function, vicarious satisfaction, and even the operation of Deity as subsisting without and apart from the man, all of which are essential elements in the accepted conception of religion. Nevertheless, profound as was my distrust of the faithfulness of the orthodox presentation, I could not reconcile myself to a renunciation of the originals on which that presentation was founded, until I had satisfied myself that I had fathomed their intended and real meaning.

I had, moreover, very early conceived a personal affection for Jesus as a man, so strong as to serve as a deterrent both from abandoning the faith founded on Him, and from accepting it as it is as worthy of Him.

Such was my standpoint, intellectual and religious, at the period in question. The time came when it found full justification; our results being such as to verify it in everyone of its manifold aspects. And not this only. The doctrine which had so mysteriously evolved itself out of my consciousness to attain by slow degrees the position of a controlling influence in my life, the doctrine, namely of a Duality subsisting in the Original Unity of Underived Being, and as inhering therefore in every unit of derived being, this doctrine proved to be the key to the mysteries both of Creation and of Redemption, as propounded in the Bible and manifested in the Christ; the key also to the nature of man, disclosing the facts both of his possession of divine potentialities as his birthright, and his endowment with the faculty whereby to discern and to realise them. And while it proved constructive in respect of Divine Truth, it proved destructive in respect of the falsification of that truth which had passed for orthodoxy, by disclosing the source, the motive, the method and the agents of that falsification.

But these things were still in the future. At the time with which we are now concerned, I had commenced a book to represent the standpoint just described, "The Keys of the Creeds." The firstand initial draft of that book was written under the sympathetic eye of one of the order of noble women to which reference has been made, and owed much to the enhancement of faculty derived by me from such conjunction of minds. The second and final draft was written under like relationship with another member of the self-same order, even she who proved to be my destined collaborator in the work of which this book recounts the story. It was published in 1875. It is necessary only to say further of the book thus produced, that notwithstanding certain defects of expression, due chiefly to an insufficient acquaintance with the terminology of metaphysics, it proved an invaluable help to very many, as was amply shown by the letters of grateful appreciation received from them by me. The keynote was that which afterwards found expression in the utterance,—

"There is no enlightenment from without: the secret of things is revealed from within.

"From without cometh no Divine Revelation: but the Spirit within beareth witness"[15].

For the lesson it contained was the lesson that the phenomenal world cannot disclose its own secret. To find this, man must seek in that substantial world which lies within himself, since all that is real is within the man. From which it followed that if there is no within, or if that within be inaccessible, either there is no reality, or man has no organon of knowledge, and is by constitution agnostic. Meanwhile, the very fact of mypossession of an ideal exempt from the limitations of the apparent, constituted for me a strong presumption in favour of the reality of the ideal.

The moment of contact between my destined colleague and myself, was as critical for one as for the other, only that in my case the crisis was intellectual. I could see to the end of the argument I was then elaborating; and that it landed me close to the dividing barrier between the two worlds of sense and spirit, supposing the latter to have any being[16]. But I neither saw beyond, nor knew how to ascertain whether or not there is a beyond. We were discussing the question of there being an inner sense in Scripture, such as my book suggested; and whether, supposing it to have such a sense, it required for its discernment any faculty more recondite than a subtle imagination; and if it did, is there such a faculty? and what is its nature? By which it will be seen that I was still in ignorance of the nature of the faculty I found in myself and recognised as especially subsisting in women, and which, for me, really made the woman.

The reply rendered by her to these questionings constituted the proof positive that I had at length discovered the mind which my own had so long craved as its sorely needed complement. In response to them she gave me a manuscript in her own writing, asking me to read it and tell her frankly what I thought of it. Having read and re-read it, Ienquired how and where she had got it. She replied by asking what I thought of it. I answered, "If there is such a thing as divine revelation, I know of nothing that comes nearer to my ideal of what it ought to be. It is exactly what the world is perishing for want of—a reasonable faith." She then told me that it had come to her in her sleep, but whence or how she did not know; nor could she say whether she had seen it or heard it, but only that it came suddenly into her mind, without her having ever heard or thought of such teaching before. It was an exposition of the Story of the Fall, exhibiting it as a parable having a significance purely spiritual, wholly reasonable, and of universal application, physical persons, things, and events described in it disappearing in favour of principles, processes, and states appertaining to the soul; no mere local history, therefore, but an eternal verity. The experience, she went on to tell me, was far from exceptional; she had received many things which had greatly struck and pleased her in the same way, and sometimes while in the waking state in a sort of day-dream. It was subsequently incorporated into our book, "The Perfect Way."

Her account of her faculty, of which she related several instances, produced a profound impression on me. It differed altogether from any that I had heard of as claimed by the votaries of "Spiritualism," a creed to which neither of us had assented; such little experience as we had of it having failed to convince us of the genuineness of its phenomena; though she, on her part, confessed to having been somewhat at a loss to account for some things she had seen. But though notspiritualists, we were not materialists. Rather were we idealists, who had yet to learn and, as the event proved, were destined shortly to learn, that the Idealisthe Real, and is Spiritual.

The event also proved that in order to learn it and to know it positively by experience, there were two conditions to be fulfilled, on both of which she had already entered, but I had yet to enter. One of these conditions was physical, the other was emotional. The former consisted in the renunciation of flesh-food in favour of a diet derived from the vegetable kingdom. The latter condition consisted in the kindling of our enthusiasm for the ideal into a flame of such ardour and intensity as to make it the dominant passion of our lives, and one in which all others would be swallowed up. It was to be an enthusiasm at once for Humanity, for Perfection, for God.

Had we been in any degree instructed in spiritual or occult science, we should have known that the renunciation of flesh-food, though in itself a physical act, has ever been recognised by initiates as the prime essential in the unfoldment of the spiritual faculties; since only when man is purely nourished can he attain clearness and fulness of spiritual perception. As it was, neither of us had ever heard of occult science, or of the necessity of such a regimen to the perfectionment of faculty. She had adopted it on grounds physiological, chemical, hygienic, æsthetic, and moral; not on grounds mental or spiritual. I now undertook to adopt it partly on the same grounds which had influenced her, and partly with a view to enhance and consolidate the sympathy subsistingbetween us. The mental and spiritual advantages of the regimen made themselves known to us by experience.

The other condition found its fulfilment through the knowledge I derived from her of the methods of the physiologists. That savages, sorcerers, brigands, religious fanatics, and corrupt priesthoods had always been wont to make torture their gain or their pastime, I was well aware, and believed that evolution would sweep them and their practices away in its course. But the discovery now first made to me that identical barbarities are systematically perpetrated by the leaders of modern science on the pretext of benefiting humanity, in an age which claims to represent the summit of such evolution as has yet been accomplished; and that after all its boasts, the best that science can do for the world is to convert it into a hell and its population into fiends, by the deliberate renunciation of the distinctive sentiments of humanity,—this was a discovery which filled me with unspeakable horror and amazement, at once raising to a white heat the enthusiasm of love for the ideal already kindled within me, and adding to it a like enthusiasm of detestation for its opposite. From which it came that I found myself under the impulsion simultaneously of two mighty influences, the one attracting, the other repelling, but both operating in the same direction. For while by the former I was drawn upwards by the beauty of an ideal indefinitely enhanced by its contrast with the foul actual below, by the latter I was impelled upwards by the hideousness of that actual. The sight of the moral abyss disclosed to me in Vivisection, as I perused volume after volume of the annals of the practice written by the perpetrators themselves, and now first made accessible to me, effectually purged out of my system any particle of dilettanteism that might have still lurked in it, compelling me to regard as of the utmost urgency all and more than all that I had hitherto contemplated doing deliberately.

This was the construction of a system of thought which by force of its appeal to both those two indispensable constituents of humanity, the head and the heart, shall compel acceptance from all persons really human, and in presence of which the whole system of which Vivisection was the typical outcome and symbol should vanish from off the earth. This system was Materialism of which only now did I discern the full significance. The systematic organisation of wholesale, protracted, uncompensatable torture, for ends purely selfish, was—I saw with absolute distinctness—not an accidental and avoidable outcome of Materialism, but its logical and inevitable outcome. And it was to the eradication of Materialism that, from that moment, I dedicated myself. It was a rescue work for both man and beast, seeing that humanity itself was menaced with extinction. For the materialist, of course, that which makes the man is the form. For me it was the character, and it was this, the character of mankind present and to come, that was at stake. For man demonised is no longer man. In the overthrow of Materialism, I saw absolutely, was salvation alone to be found, whether for man or beast. The consideration that only as an abstainer from flesh-food I could with entire consistency contend against vivisection, wasa potent factor in determining my change of diet. True, the distinction between death and torture was a broad one. But the statistics I now for the first time perused, of the slaughter-house and the cattle-traffic, showed beyond question, that torture, and this prolonged and severe, is involved in the use of animals for food as well as for science. And over and above this was the instinctive perception of the probability that neither would they who had them killed, whether for food, for sport, or for clothing, be allowed the privilege of rescuing them from the hands of the physiologist; nor would the animals be allowed to accept their deliverance at the hands of those who thus used them. They who would save others, we felt, must first make sacrifice in themselves. And in the presence of the joy of working to effect such salvation, sacrifice would cease to be sacrifice.

This, too, we noted, and with no small satisfaction—that to make the rescue of the animals an immediate and urgent motive, was in no way to abandon the original motive of hatred to the tenet of vicarious atonement. For we recognised vivisection itself as but the extension to the domain of science, of the very principle by which we had been inexpressibly revolted in the domain of religion;—the principle of seeking one's own salvation by the sacrifice of another, and that the innocent. And so we learnt that "New Scientist is but Old Priest writ differently,"—to vary Milton's expression; and that in both domains the tenet had its root in Materialism. When the time came for our mission to be more particularly defined, our satisfaction was unbounded on receiving the charge, "We mean you to lay barethe secrets of the world's sacrificial system." It expressed with absolute conciseness and exactitude all that we had in our minds, far better than we could have expressed it.

The importance of this question of vivisection in vitalising us for the work before us, will be seen by the following fact. The time came when we knew that the work committed to us was that revelation anew of the Christ which was to constitute His Second Advent, inasmuch as it was the interpretation of the truth of which He was the manifestation. It was to be a spiritual coming; in the "clouds of heaven," the heaven of the "kingdom within" of man's restored understanding. And, as at His first advent so at His second, He was to have His birth among the animals.

And so it verily was. For—as I have elsewhere stated[17]—"Their terrible wrongs, culminating at the hands of their scientific tormentors, were the last drops which filled to overflowing with anguish, indignation and wrath, hearts already brimming with the sense of the world's degradation and misery, wringing from them the cry which rent the heavens for His descent, and in direct and immediate response to which He came.

"For the New Gospel of Interpretation was vouchsafed in express recognition of the determined endeavour, by means of a thought absolutely fearless and free, to scale the topmost heights, fathom the lowest depths, and penetrate to the inmost recesses of Consciousness, in search of the solution of the problem of Existence, under the assured conviction that, when found, it wouldprove to be one that would make above all things Vivisection impossible, if only by demonstrating the constitution of things to be such that, terrible as is the lot of the victims of the practice here, they are not without compensation hereafter, while the lot of their tormentors will be unspeakably worse than even that of their victims here. And so it proved, with absolute certainty to be the case, to the full vindication at the same time of the Divine Justice and the Divine Love;" no experience being withheld which would qualify us to bear positive testimony thereto. For, although at the outset we were, as I have said, in no wise believers in the possibility of such experiences, the time came, and came quickly, when the veil was withdrawn, and the secrets of the Beyond were disclosed to us in plenitude, in its every sphere, from the abyss of hell to the heights of heaven. And we learnt that this had become possible through the passionate energy with which, in our search for the highest truth, for the highest ends, and in purest love to redeem, we had directed our thought inwards and upwards, living at the same time the life requisite to qualify us for such perceptions. Thus did we obtain practical realisation of the promise that they who do the divine will, by living the divine life, shall know of the divine doctrine. Our whole mental attitude had been one of prayer in its essential sense; which is not that ofsayingprayers, but as it came to be defined for us—"the intense direction of the will and desire towards the Highest; an unchanging intent to know nothing but the Highest." Because "to think inwardly, to pray intensely, and to imagine centrally, is to hold converse with God." And wehad done this without knowing it was prayer, or calling it by that name. For, knowing only the conventional conception of prayer, we had recoiled from it as from other conventional conceptions of things religious.

Now, however, we found that we had done instinctively and spontaneously precisely what was necessary to bring us into relations at once with our spiritual selves and with the world of those who consist only of the spiritual self. For, by thus becoming vitalised and sensitive in that part of man's system which endures and passes on, we had come into open conditions with the world of those who have thus endured and passed on, and are no longer of the terrestrial, but of the celestial, having surmounted all lower and intermediate planes. All this came to us without anticipation on our part, or any conscious seeking for it; but yet without causing dismay or surprise when it came. For it came so gradually as to seem to be but the natural and orderly result of the unfoldment of our own spiritual consciousness, and excited only feelings of joy and thankfulness at finding our method and aspirations crowned with so high a success. Thus was it made absolutely clear to us that, so far from divine revelation involving miracle, or requiring for its instruments persons other in kind than the ordinary, it is a prerogative of man, belonging to him as man; and requiring for its reception only that he be fully man, alive and sensitive in his own innermost and highest, in his centre as in his circumference. Thus living on the quick and finding no others who did so, it seemed to us as if we alone were the quick, and all others were dead.

We noted yet another way in which we supplemented and complemented each other. It was in this wise. As I was bent on the construction of a system of thought which should be at once a science, a philosophy, a morality, and a religion, and recognisable by the understanding as indubitably true; she was bent on the construction of a rule of life equally obvious and binding, and recognisable by the sentiments as alone according with them, its basis being that sense of perfect justice which springs from perfect sympathy.

By which it will be seen that while it was her aim to establish a perfect practice, which might or might not consist with a perfect doctrine, it was my aim to establish a perfect doctrine which would inevitably issue in a perfect practice, by at once defining it and supplying an all-compelling motive for its observance.

These, as we at once recognised, were the two indispensable halves of one perfect whole. But we had yet to learn the nature and source of the compelling motive for its enforcement.

The deficiency was made good by the discovery of the fact of man's permanence as an individual. The revelation of this truth was the demonstration to us of the inanity—not to use a stronger term—of the system called "Positivism." In ignoring the soul, that system lacks the motive and repudiates the source of the sentiments on which it insists, and to the experiences of which those sentiments are due.

CHAPTER II.

THE INITIATION.

My visit to the rectory resulted in an intimacy which made me to such extent a member of the family as to remove all obstacles to the collaboration required of us. It was soon made evident that not only our association, but her design of seeking a medical education was for both of us an indispensable element in our preparation for our now recognised joint-mission. In its general aspect that mission had for its purpose the overthrow of Materialism, and in order to qualify us for it, it was deemed necessary that we undergo a training in the most materialistic of the world's schools. This was the University of Paris. She alone was to seek a diploma. For me it was enough that I accompany her in her studies, and that we submit the teachings received by her to rigid analysis by our combined faculties. Doing this, we found ourselves competent to declare positively the falsity of the materialistic system on the strength both of logical processes and of practical demonstration, by means of the experiences of which we found ourselves the recipients. For although we had never heard of such things as "psychic faculties,"—the very phrase was not yet invented—we found ourselves possessed of them in such measure that no longer did the veil which divides the world sensible from the world spiritualconstitute an impassable barrier, but both were open to view, and the latter was as real and accessible as the former.

It was about the middle of 1876 that this remarkable accession of faculty began to manifest itself in plenitude, I being the first to experience it, notwithstanding my previous total lack of any faculty of the kind, or of belief in the possibility of my having it. But the purification which my physical system had undergone by means of my new dietary regimen, and the constant and intense direction of my thought inwards and upwards, the forcible concentration of my mind upon the essential and substantial ideas of things, and this under impulsion of an enthusiasm kindled to a white heat—an enthusiasm, as already said, both of aspiration and of repulsion—and the enhancement of faculty through sympathetic association,—these had so attenuated the veil that it no longer impeded my vision of spiritual realities. And I found myself—without seeking for or expecting it—spiritually sensitive in respect of sight, hearing, and touch, and in open, palpable relations with a world which I had no difficulty in recognising as of celestial nature; so far did it transcend everything of which I had heard or read in the annals of the contemporary spiritualism; so entirely did it accord with my conceptions of the divine.

That I refrain from employing the terms "supernatural" and "superhuman," is because they assume the knowledge of the limits of the natural and the human, and arbitrarily exclude from those categories regions of being which may really belong to them. The celestial and the divine are not necessarily either superhuman or supernatural;they may be but the higher human and the higher natural. If they are at all, they are according to natural order, and it is natural for them to be.

Nevertheless, vast as was the interval it represented between my past and present states, it came so naturally and easily as to be clearly the result, not of any abnormal or accidental cataclysm involving a breach of continuity, but of a perfectly orderly unfoldment every step of which was distinctly traceable. For though the process was akin to that of the attainment of sight by one previously blind, and the final issue was sudden, the issue had been led up to in such wise as to render it legitimate and normal. For its earliest indication[18]was an opening of the mind in such wise that subjects hitherto beyond my grasp, and problems deemed insoluble, became comprehensible and clear; while whole vistas of thought perfectly continuous and coherent, would disclose themselves to my view, stretching far away towards their source in the very principles of things, so that I found myself intellectually the master of questions which previously had baffled me.

The experience I am about to relate was not only remarkable in itself, it was remarkable also as striking what proved to be the keynote of all our subsequent work, the doctrine, namely, of thesubstantialidentity of God and man. It had suddenly flashed on my mind as a necessary and self-evident truth, the contrary of which was absurd; and I had seated myself at my writing-table to give it expression for a book I had lately commenced[19]. I was alone and locked in my room in my chambers off Pall Mall, Mrs Kingsford being at the time in Paris, accompanied by her husband. It was past midnight, and all without was quiet; there was not a sound to break my abstraction. This was so profound that I had written some four pages without drawing breath, the matter seeming to flow not merely from but through me without conscious mental effort of my own. Isawso clearly that there was no need tothink. In the course of the writing I became distinctly aware of a presence as of someone bending over me from behind, and actively engaged in blending with and reinforcing my mind. Being unwilling to risk an interruption to the flow of my thought, I resisted the impulse to look up and ascertain who or what it was. Of alarm at so unlooked-for a presence I had not a particle. Be it whom it might, the accord between us was as perfect as if it had been merely a projection of my own higher self. I had never heard of higher selves in those days, or of the possibility of such a phenomenon; but the idea of such an explanation occurred to me then and there. But this solution of the problem of my visitant's personality was presently dissipated by the event.

The passage I had been writing concluded with these words:—

"The perfect man of any race is no other than the perfect expression in the flesh of all the essential characteristics of the soul of that race. Escaping the limitations of the individual man, such an one represents the soul of his people. Escaping the limitations of the individualpeople, he represents the soul of all peoples, or Humanity. Escaping the limitations of Humanity, but still preserving its essential characteristics, he represents the soul of the system of which the earth is but an individual member. And finally, after climbing many a further step of the infinite ladder of existence, and escaping the limitations of all systems whatever, he represents—nay, finds that he is—the soul of the universe, even God Himself, once 'manifested in the flesh,' and now 'perfected through suffering,' 'purified, sanctified, redeemed, justified, glorified,' 'crowned with honour and glory,' and 'seated for ever at the right hand of the Father,' 'one with God,' even God Himself."

At this moment—my mind being so wholly preoccupied with the utterance and all that I saw it involved, as to make me oblivious of all else—the presence I had felt bending over me darted itself into me just below the cerebral bulb at the back of my neck, the sensation being that of a slight tap, as of a finger-touch; and then in a voice full, rich, firm, measured, and so strong that it resounded through the room, exclaimed, in a tone indicative of high satisfaction, "At last I have found a man through whom I can speak!"

So powerful was the intonation that the tympana of my ears vibrated to the sound, palpably bulging outwards, showing that they had been struck on the inner side, and that the presence had actually projected itself into my larynx and spoken from within me, but without using my organs of speech, I was conscious of being in radiant health at the time, and was unable to detect any symptom of being otherwise. My thought, too, and observation were perfectly coherent and continuous, and I could discern no smallest pretext for distrust of thereality of the experience. And my delight and satisfaction, which were unbounded, found expression in the single utterance, "Then the ancients were right, and the Gods ARE!" so resistless was the conviction that only by a divinised being could the wisdom and power be manifested of the presence of which I was conscious. The words, "At last I have found a man" were incompatible with the theory of its being an objectivation of my own particular ego, and, moreover, they indicated the speaker as one high in authority over the race.

Nothing more passed on that occasion; but a vivid impression was left with me that my visitant belonged to the order of spirits called "Planetaries." But as I had then no knowledge of such beings, I put aside the question of his identity for the solution which I trusted would come of further enlightenment. This came in due time, with the result of confirming the impression given me at the time. The explanation, however, does not come within the scope of this present writing. Some time afterwards, when searching at the library of the British Museum in the writings of the old occultists for experiences analogous to our own, I came upon one account which described the entrance into the man of an overshadowing spirit exactly as it had occurred to me, so far as it concerned the nape of the neck as the point of entry and the slightness of the sensation. The only further reference to the incident necessary here is as follows.

A little later Mrs Kingsford had returned to England, being compelled to quit Paris by a severe illness which she had contracted immediately on her arrival there; and was pursuing her studies inLondon, making her home with a relative in Chelsea. The event proved that she had been sent back by the supervisors of our work expressly in order to be within reach of me. Indeed, an intimation had been given me before she had gone that she would not be allowed to stay abroad, as our near contiguity was indispensable, and I had accordingly viewed her departure with considerable disquietude, circumstances rendering it impossible for me to leave home just then. Prior to coming back she had obtained from the Minister of Education the exceptional privilege of a permit allowing her attendance at a London hospital to count in her Paris course.

The first experience received by her in relation to our work, after her return to London, was the terrific vision of "The Doomed Train"[20].

On bringing it to me on the morning of its occurrence, she exclaimed as she entered the room, "Oh, I have had such a terrific dream! It has quite shattered me. And I have brought it for you to try and find its meaning, if it has one. I wrote it down the moment I was able." Her appearance fully confirmed her statement. It alarmed me. This is the account:—

"I was visited, last night, by a dream of so strange and vivid a kind that I feel impelled to communicate it to you, not only to relieve my own mind of the oppression which the recollection of itcauses me, but also to give you an opportunity of finding the meaning, which I am still far too much shaken and terrified to seek for myself.

"It seemed to me that you and I were two of a vast company of men and women, upon all of whom, with the exception of myself—for I was there voluntarily—sentence of death had been passed. I was sensible of the knowledge—how obtained I know not—that this terrible doom had been pronounced by the official agents of some new reign of terror. Certain I was that none of the party had really been guilty of any crime deserving of death; but that the penalty had been incurred through their connection with some regime, political, social, or religious, which was doomed to utter destruction. It became known among us that the sentence was about to be carried out on a colossal scale; but we remained in absolute ignorance as to the place and method of the intended execution. Thus far my dream gave me no intimation of the scene which next burst on me,—a scene which strained to their utmost tension every sense of sight, hearing, and touch in a manner unprecedented in any dream I have previously had.

"It was night, dark and starless, and I found myself, together with the whole company of doomed men and women who knew that they were soon to die, but not how or where, in a railway train hurrying through the darkness to some unknown destination. I sat in a carriage quite at the rear end of the train, in a corner seat, and was leaning out of the open window, peering into the darkness, when, suddenly, a voice, which seemed to speak out of the air, said to me in a low, distinct,intense tone, the mere recollection of which makes me shudder,—'The sentence is being carried out even now. You are all of you lost. Ahead of the train is a frightful precipice of monstrous height, and at its base beats a fathomless sea. The railway ends only with the abyss. Over that will the train hurl itself into annihilation. THERE IS NO ONE ON THE ENGINE!'

"At this I sprang from my seat in horror, and looked round at the faces of the persons in the carriage with me. No one of them had spoken, or had heard those awful words. The lamplight from the dome of the carriage flickered on the forms about me. I looked from one to the other, but saw no sign of alarm given by any of them. Then again the voice out of the air spoke to me,—'There is but one way to be saved. You must leap out of the train!'

"In frantic haste I pushed open the carriage-door and stepped out on the footboard. The train was going at a terrific pace, swaying to and fro as with the passion of its speed; and the mighty wind of its passage beat my hair about my face and tore at my garments.

"Until this moment I had not thought of you, or even seemed conscious of your presence in the train. Holding tightly on to the rail by the carriage-door, I began to creep along the footboard towards the engine, hoping to find a chance of dropping safely down on the line. Hand-over-hand I passed along in this way from one carriage to another; and as I did so I saw by the light within each carriage that the passengers had no idea of the fate upon which they were being hurried. Atlength, in one of the compartments, I sawyou. 'Come out!' I cried; 'come out! Save yourself! In another minute we shall be dashed to pieces!'

"You rose instantly, wrenched open the door, and stood beside me outside on the footboard. The rapidity at which we were going was now more fearful than ever. The train rocked as it fled onwards. The wind shrieked as we were carried through it. 'Leap down!' I cried to you. 'Save yourself! It is certain death to stay here. Before us is an abyss; and there is no one on the engine!'

"At this you turned your face full upon me with a look of intense earnestness, and said, 'No, we will not leap down; we will stop the train.'

"With these words you left me, and crept along the footboard towards the front of the train. Full of half-angry anxiety at what seemed to me a Quixotic act, I followed. In one of the carriages we passed I saw my mother and eldest brother, unconscious as the rest. Presently we reached the last carriage, and saw by the lurid light of the furnace that the voice had spoken truly, and that there was no one on the engine.

"You continued to move onwards. 'Impossible! Impossible!' I cried; 'it cannot be done. Oh, pray, come away!'

"Then you knelt upon the footboard, and said, 'You are right. It cannot be done in that way; but we can save the train. Help me to get these irons asunder.'

"The engine was connected with the train by two great iron hooks and staples. By a tremendous effort, in making which I almost lost my balance, we unhooked the irons and detached the train; when, with a mighty leap as of some mad supernatural monster, the engine sped on its way alone, shooting back as it went a great flaming trail of sparks, and was lost in the darkness. We stood together on the footboard, watching in silence the gradual slackening of the speed. When at length the train had come to a standstill, we cried to the passengers, 'Saved! Saved!' And then, amid the confusion of opening the doors and descending and eager talking, my dream ended, leaving me shattered and palpitating with the horror of it."

This vision was intended to show us the destruction, moral, intellectual, and spiritual, towards which the world was tending by following materialistic modes of thought, and the part we were to bear in arresting its progress towards the fatal precipice, at all hazards to ourselves. The startling announcement made to her by the invisible voice when the crowded train was rushing at full speed to its doom, "There is no one on the engine!" exactly represented the philosophy which, denying mind in the universe, recognises only blind force.

I had determined to include an account of this vision in the book on which I was then engaged, "England and Islam." And I was alone in my rooms, reading the proofs of it, my mind being occupied solely with the letterpress, until I came to the remark ascribed to me in the vision, as made in reply to her entreaty that I would jump out with her to save ourselves, "No, we will not leap down, we will stop the train." At this moment the voice which shortly before[21]had said to me, "At last I have found a man through whom I can speak!" addressed me again, saying in a pleasedand encouraging tone, as if the speaker had been following me in my reading, and desired to remove any doubts I might have of the reality of our mission,—"Yes! Yes! I have trusted all to you!" This time he spoke from without me, but apparently quite close by. And among the impressions which at the same instant were flashed into my mind, was the impression, amounting to a conviction, that whatever might be the part assigned to others in the work of the new illumination in progress and the restoration thereby to the world of one true doctrine of existence, the exposition of its innermost and highest sphere, the head corner-stone of the pyramid of the system which is to make the humanity of the future, had been committed to us alone. And now, writing nearly twenty years later, I can truly say that this conviction has never for a moment been weakened, but on the contrary has gathered confirmation and strength with every successive accession of experience and knowledge, and while cognisant of and fully appreciating all that has taken place in the unfoldment of the world's thought during the interval.

Ever since that memorable winter of 1876-7, the conviction, shared equally by my colleague, has been with me that the controlling spirit of the Hebrew prophets was that also of our work, the purpose of which was the accomplishment of their prophecies, by the promotion of the world's spiritual consciousness to a level surpassing any yet attained by it, to the regeneration of the church and the establishment of the kingdom of God with power. Having which conviction, there was for us but one object in life:—to fulfil atwhatever cost to ourselves the conditions necessary to make us fitting instruments for the perfect accomplishment of a work which we recognised as the loftiest that could be committed to mortals.

My colleague's enforced return to London was promptly signalised by an experience which served not only yet further to demonstrate the reality and nature of our mission, and of her primacy in our work, but to disclose its essentially Christian character, which hitherto had been an open question for us. For that upon which we ourselves were bent was the discovery of the nature of existence at first hand, and independently of any existing system whatever. It was truth and truth alone that we sought, and to this end we had laboured to make ourselves as those of whom it is said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." For in divesting ourselves of all prepossessions and prejudices, we had made ourselves as "little children." We were neither believers nor disbelievers, but pure sceptics in that best sense of the term in which it denotes the unbiased seeker after God and truth. This is to say, we were, and we gloried in being, absolutely free thinkers, a term which, in its true acceptation, we regarded as man's noblest title. This is the sense in which it denotes a thought able to exercise itself in all directions open to thought, outwards and downwards to matter and negation, and inwards and upwards to spirit and reality. And our work proved in the event to be the supreme triumph of Free Thought.

The experience in question was as follows. It was night and I was alone and locked in my chambers, and was writing at full speed, lest itshould escape me, an exposition of the place and office of woman under the coming regeneration. And I was conscious of an exaltation of faculty such as might conceivably be the result of an enhancement of my own mind by junction with another and superior mind. I was even conscious, though in a far less degree than before, of an invisible presence. But I was too much engrossed with my idea to pay heed to persons, be they whom they might, human or divine, as well as anxious to take advantage of such assistance. I had clearly and vividly in my mind all that I desired to say for several pages on. Then, suddenly and completely, like the stoppage of a stream in its flow through a tube by the quick turning of a tap, the current of my thought ceased, leaving my mind an utter blank as to what I had meant to say, and totally unable to recall the least idea of it. So palpable was its withdrawal, that it seemed to me as if it must still be hovering somewhere near me, and I looked up and impatiently exclaimed aloud to it, "Where are you?" At length, after ransacking my mind in vain, I turned to other work, for I was perfectly fresh, and the desertion had been in no way due to exhaustion, physical or mental. On taking note of the time of the disappearance, I found it was 11.30 precisely.

The next morning failed to bring my thought back to me as I had hoped it would do; but it brought instead, an unusually early visit from Mrs. Kingsford, who was—as I have said—staying in Chelsea. "Such a curious thing happened to me last night," she began, on entering the room, "and I want to tell you of it and see if you can explain it. I had finished my day's work, butthough it was late I was not inclined to rest, for I was wakeful with a sense of irritation at the thought of what you are doing, and at my exclusion from any share in it. And I was feeling envious of your sex for the superior advantages you have over ours of doing great and useful work. As I sat by the fire thinking this, I suddenly found myself impelled to take a pencil and paper, and to write. I did so, and wrote with extreme rapidity, in a half-dreamy state, without any clear idea of what I was writing, but supposing it to be something expressive of my discontent. I had soon covered a page and a half of a large sheet with writing different from my own, and it was quite unlike what was in my mind, as you will see."

On perusing the paper I found that it was a continuation of my missing thought, taken up at the point where it had left me, but translated to a higher plane, the expression also being similarly elevated in accordance both with the theme and the writer, having the exquisiteness so characteristic of her genius. To my enquiry as to the hour of the occurrence, she at once replied, "Half-past eleven exactly; for I was so struck by it that I took particular notice of the time."

What I had written was as follows:—

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