Some day for us shall come into that blank sky-horizon which is called the zenith, a stranger, a man or a god, perhaps not like ourselves, yet having affinities with ourselves, and correlating ourselves to some family of men or gods of which we are all lost children.  We shall then know our universal function and find our universal orbit.

As yet the True Sun stands in the antipodes, the great light is not vouchsafed.  In the night of ignorance our little sun is shining and stars gleam upon our sky-horizons.  But when the True Sun shines their brightness will be obscured, and we shall know a new day and a new night, a new heaven and a new earth.

It is written, “When He appears we shall be like Him.”

VI

THE PILGRIMAGE TO JERUSALEM

I

Once, possibly, upon the world, man did not know of God; he had not looked to the blank horizon and spoken to the Someone beyond.  He had all the need to speak, all the oppression in his soul, all the sorrow and longing pent up in him and the tears unshed, but knew no means of relief, did not even conceive of any one beyond himself.  He had no great Father, as we have.  A strange, unhappy life he lived upon the world, uncomforted, unfriended.  He looked at the stars and comprehended them not; and at the graves, and they said nought.  He walked alone under heaven’s wide hollowness.

We of later days have God as a heritage, or if we did find Him of ourselves, the road was made easy for us.  But some one far away back in human life found God first, and said to Him the first prayer; some hard, untutored savage found out the gentlest and loveliest fact in our religion.  A savage came upon the pearl and understood it and fell down in joy.  A man one day named God and emptied his heart to Him in prayer.  And he told the discovery to his brothers, and men all began to pray.  The world lost half its heaviness at once.  Men learned that their prayers were nearly all the same, that God heard the same story from thousands and hundreds of thousands of hearts.  Thus men came nearer to one another, and knew themselves one in the presence of God, and they prayed together and formed churches.  Man, the homeless one, had advanced a step towards his home, for he began to live partly in the beyond.

I am reminded of this by the joy which accompanies the personal discovery of some new rite which brings us into relation with the unseen.

Following that hypothetical first man, how many real first men there have been, each discovering new things about God and the beyond, giving mankind new letters in the Sanscrit, and each discovery accompanied by joy and relief.

The conception of life as part of a journey to the heavenly city was, I think, one of these discoveries; and its rite was the church procession to the altar.  In symbolic act man learned to make the journey beyond the blank horizon.  He enlarged the church procession to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he enlarged the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the pilgrimage of life itself.  In the understanding of life as a pilgrimage, the wanderer and seeker has the world for his church.