...  Love not pleasure, love God.  This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.”

He who has yielded up that self, that personality that men most love, and to which they cling with such fierce tenacity, has left behind him all perplexity, and has entered into a simplicity so profoundly simple as to be looked upon by the world, involved as it is in a network of error, as foolishness.  Yet such a one has realized the highest wisdom, and is at rest in the Infinite.  He “accomplishes without striving,” and all problems melt before him, for he has entered the region of reality, and deals, not with changing effects, but with the unchanging principles of things.  He is enlightened with a wisdom which is as superior to ratiocination, as reason is to animality.  Having yielded up his lusts, his errors, his opinions and prejudices, he has entered into possession of the knowledge of God, having slain the selfish desire for heaven, and along with it the ignorant fear of hell; having relinquished even the love of life itself, he has gained supreme bliss and Life Eternal, the Life which bridges life and death, and knows its own immortality.  Having yielded up all without reservation, he has gained all, and rests in peace on the bosom of the Infinite.

Only he who has become so free from self as to be equally content to be annihilated as to live, or to live as to be annihilated, is fit to enter into the Infinite.  Only he who, ceasing to trust his perishable self, has learned to trust in boundless measure the Great Law, the Supreme Good, is prepared to partake of undying bliss.

For such a one there is no more regret, nor disappointment, nor remorse, for where all selfishness has ceased these sufferings cannot be; and whatever happens to him he knows that it is for his own good, and he is content, being no longer the servant of self, but the servant of the Supreme.  He is no longer affected by the changes of earth, and when he hears of wars and rumors of wars his peace is not disturbed, and where men grow angry and cynical and quarrelsome, he bestows compassion and love.  Though appearances may contradict it, he knows that the world is progressing, and that

      “Through its laughing and its weeping,
      Through its living and its keeping,
    Through its follies and its labors, weaving in and out of sight,
      To the end from the beginning,
      Through all virtue and all sinning,
    Reeled from God’s great spool of Progress, runs the golden
          thread of light.”

When a fierce storm is raging none are angered about it, because they know it will quickly pass away, and when the storms of contention are devastating the world, the wise man, looking with the eye of Truth and pity, knows that it will pass away, and that out of the wreckage of broken hearts which it leaves behind the immortal Temple of Wisdom will be built.