My next recollection is that the events of my past life were rising before me.  The hands on the dial of time went back a score of years, and I was a young man of twenty-one, living in chambers off Holborn.  One evening there burst over London a fearful thunderstorm, and hearing a knock at my door, I opened it, to find a beautiful girl named Dorothy, the daughter of the housekeeper, standing there.  Terrified by the lightning, and finding herself alone, she begged to be allowed to remain until her mother’s return.

The words had scarcely passed her lips before there came another blinding flash of lightning, followed almost instantaneously by a terrific crash of thunder.  With a cry of passion and fear, she flung her arms around me, and the next moment I found myself pressing her to my heart and telling her, amid a score of burning kisses, that I loved her.

Almost immediately afterwards, we heard the opening of doors, which indicated her mother’s home-coming; but, before leaving, Dorothy told me that the room immediately above mine was her own.  Of the hell-born thought which rose in my mind as I listened she, I am sure, had no suspicion.  Need I tell the remainder of my story?  I think not.

* * * * *

You may wonder, perhaps, why I recall circumstances that happened so many years ago.  You would cease to wonder had you seen the ghost of the past rise up to call upon God and His Christ for judgment upon the betrayer.  For this was my first glimpse of hell; this was my day of judgment.  The recording angel of my awakened conscience showed me my sin, and the ruin my sin had wrought, as God sees, and I realised that—­But no!  I am sick, I am fainting!  I cannot—­I cannot write more.

II.—­The Secret of Man’s Destiny

“When anyone dies,” I had been told in childhood, “he goes either to heaven or to hell, according to whether he has been a good or bad man,” and I recollect being not a little troubled as to what became of the people whose virtues were about equally matched with their vices.  When I opened my eyes in that ante-chamber of the spirit-world into which I have had admittance I discovered that heaven and hell as separate places have no existence, for the good, the bad, and the indifferent exist together exactly as they exist here.  I do not say that there will be no day of harvesting in which the tares shall finally be separated from the wheat.  On that point, as on many others, I am ignorant.  Men and women whom I know on earth speak of the dead—­“the changed”—­as being perfected in knowledge and as having solved for ever “the great secret.”  That is not my experience.

So far from “the great secret,” the secret of man’s destiny and God’s Being, becoming known at death, the facts as I found them are that these remain almost as great a mystery after death as before.