The morning call., 1893-01-15
mortality and immortality, between dark
paoe apd liuhf

mortality and immortality, between dark
| ness and light.
Hence our spiritualstic seances. too
| oftenih ready refuge of frauds and i'm
| posters, but also too often the refuge of
| those who, like John on Patmos, have
| ceased to concern themselves in the affairs
OF the world. and want only to see mani
Tested those gone before, or 10 be shown
''the things that shall be hereafter"
What host of strange ideas crowd on
the mind when it is cynicaly said that this
Besant- Blayatsky business is ''all non
sense"
Keats. who "felt the daisies growing over
| him; Shelley, who wrote long ere his bark
set out on that last trip on the Gulf of Le-
rlcl, plainly foreSeelng not only the manner
of his death, but where he would be buried
plainly seeing also what the oceultists
would call the astral form of Keats.
The breath whose might have iavoked in song
Descends upon me: my spirits bark is driven
Far from the shore Tar from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never TO the tempest given.
The massy earth and sphered stars riveni
am borne. darkly fearfuly, afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil OF heaven
The soul of Adonas, like star,
Becxons from the abode where tie eternal are.
know nothing about astral plans, though
1t seems perfectly comprehensive aud lOgi-
cal that man can, by his own choice of as
sociates or no associates, get little nearer
the gods or a little nearer TO hadeS. Byron
wrote all his finest works in exile. Goethe's
Faust is bridge over the gulf Of many
a mans conscience. There arc many mate
rial things. so called, like ship, which take
on life of their own. The precipitation of
letters may be, and possibly is, the merest
fraud, the theOsophists Notwithstanding ;
but who can read, by the inner light which
leads us to personify the sun and moon and
ships the following bit by Walter Charming
describing ship in gale. 1t was pub
lished way back in 1856:
''She seemed as if looking at The peril be-
hnr M frN" vh oh hnf meta
before she had escaped, with a calm de-
fiance, the assurance of her own entire
safety. Why Is it that a moral character,
an intellectual nature, is sometimes seen
by us to attach to purely natural things?
Is it not the natural transfer of the power
ard will of man to that which he so
wisely. so nobly controls, which divests out
ward circumstance of all its power; yes,
making it tributary to the highest good?
Is it not man speaking In his works?"
l don't believe greatly in ghosts, and
would pre- er in the ordinary state of things
to do as Nicholas did, consult a physician,
il saw anything 'uncanny." But | have
no doubt of one thing any more than have
of my own existence, that the bridge of
sighs,' the bridge between this world and
the next. is very narrow one. and that
man can get glimpse IL he wants to. He
will be more useful to his fellow beings by
turning his vision inward on this side and
leaving we'll alone.
A mans mind Is very much like lens,a
convex or concave as the case may be- or
perchance as he wills it. Convex 1t may
concentrate rays of eight from without
on the gray matter of his brain; concave,
he may by his will and desire for imparting
the knowledge he thinks he possesses con-
vert parallel into divergent RAYS and seek to
enghten the world to the extent of his
ability.
/ think Victor Hugo must have been
inspired by something more than the ghost
OF patriotism when he wrote in lies Mis-
cradles" of what the Belgian peasant sees
and hears in the night apart from supersti-
tious fears) on the battlefield OF Waterloo.
Materialism and immaterialism are not
farther apart than the positive and mega
tive 10 galyanic battery. A negative ele-
ment may be positive to another negative
element, and who knows what electricity
Is. as cid Tom Carlyle shrewdly asked
thirty years ago.
Ice is a solid; water liquid steam Is
Invisible gas. but they are the same thing.
whence comes the oil in the herring and
the porpoise. both Of which live in the sea,
that contains no oil? Hydrogen and car
bon are not tie easiest of atoms for the
most skilled chemist to combine.
We know so little and we think we know
so much. But we want to know more, and
hence the Bavatskys and Besants, who
periodically give US pause" despite cur
selves.
To my mind the first man of the modern
era who put oecultism into practical shape,
If such term can be used. and made the
Blavatsky- Besant hypothesis ineligible,
was the first Lord Lytton, the novelist of
the name and fame.
There is not line in the many hundreds
of thousands of occult lines, recently pub
lished. TO which 'Zanoni' and "a Strange
Story" do rot furnish key.
had ransacked the occult
~etia TO Swedenborg. He
end his unhappy Comes
ai5ism threw hin, back
Ave gone so close mn