The angels of divine peace and joy are always at hand, and if you do not see them, and hear them, and dwell with them, it is because you shut yourself out from them, and prefer the company of the spirits of evil within you. You are what you will to be, what you wish to be, what you prefer to be. You can commence to purify yourself, and by so doing can arrive at peace, or you can refuse to purify yourself, and so remain with suffering.
Step aside, then; come out of the fret and the fever of life; away from the scorching heat of self, and enter the inward resting-place where the cooling airs of peace will calm, renew, and restore you.
Come out of the storms of sin and anguish. Why be troubled and tempest-tossed when the haven of Peace of God is yours!
Give up all self-seeking; give up self, and lo! the Peace of God is yours!
Subdue the animal within you; conquer every selfish uprising, every discordant voice; transmute the base metals of your selfish nature into the unalloyed gold of Love, and you shall realize the Life of Perfect Peace. Thus subduing, thus conquering, thus transmuting, you will, O reader! while living in the flesh, cross the dark waters of mortality, and will reach that Shore upon which the storms of sorrow never beat, and where sin and suffering and dark uncertainty cannot come. Standing upon that Shore, holy, compassionate, awakened, and self-possessed and glad with unending gladness, you will realize that
“Never the Spirit was
born, the Spirit will cease to be never;
Never was time it was not,
end and beginning are dreams;
Birthless and deathless and
changeless remaineth the Spirit for ever;
Death hath not touched it
at all, dead though the house of it seems.”
You will then know the meaning of Sin, of Sorrow, of Suffering, and that the end thereof is Wisdom; will know the cause and the issue of existence.
And with this realization you will enter into rest, for this is the bliss of immortality, this the unchangeable gladness, this the untrammeled knowledge, undefiled Wisdom, and undying Love; this, and this only, is the realization of Perfect Peace.
O thou who wouldst teach men
of Truth!
Hast thou passed
through the desert of doubt?
Art thou purged by the fires
of sorrow? hath ruth
The
fiends of opinion cast out
Of thy human heart? Is
thy soul so fair
That no false thought can
ever harbor there?
O thou who wouldst teach men
of Love!
Hast thou passed
through the place of despair?
Hast thou wept through the
dark night of grief?
does
it move
(Now
freed from its sorrow and care)
Thy human heart to pitying
gentleness,
Looking on wrong, and hate,
and ceaseless stress?
O thou who wouldst teach men
of Peace!
Hast thou crossed
the wide ocean of strife?
Hast thou found on the Shores
of the Silence,
Release
from all the wild unrest of life?
From thy human heart hath
all striving gone,
Leaving but Truth, and Love,
and Peace alone?