We are all on the road to the City of Jerusalem.  Those who are consciously on the road may call themselves pilgrims; they have a life of glory in the heart as well as of toiling by the way.  They are in a certain definite perspective, and they see all things that happen to them in the light of the pilgrimage.  I for my part, directly I definitely set out for Jerusalem, on the very first day, at the sight of the first stranger who crossed my path, exclaimed to myself, “I meet him on the way to Jerusalem; that makes a difference, does it not?”

But not only does the goal of the pilgrimage lend a new significance to the present and the future; it also lights up the past.  It makes every idlest step of worth.  It makes us so understanding of the past that we would not alter one jot or tittle in it.  Our whole life is transfigured.  Every deed of our hands, every thought of our minds and word of our lips, every deed of others or of Nature seen, every word of man or sound of Nature heard, is made into one glowing garment—­the story of our life-pilgrimage via the present moment to the Heavenly City.

I started on my pilgrimage long ago, so long ago I can hardly tell when.  As Jeremy the pilgrim said of Mikhail:  “He wished to go when he was a little boy; that means, he began to go then, for whenever you begin to wish you begin the pilgrimage.  After that, no matter where you are, you are sure to be on the way.”  It is a stage in the awakening of consciousness, that wishing to go; the next stage is intending to go, and the next, deciding to go and setting out—­but independently of these wishes and intentions and decisions, we were really on the road, and going all the while.  By our true wishes we divine our destiny.

Yes, even long ago I wished, and to-day I am still on the way, though I have actually pilgrimaged to Jerusalem in Palestine.  My pilgrimage was a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage.  It was the drawing of a picture on earth of a journey in heaven.  As a day is to a year, and as a year to man’s life, so is man’s life to that which we do not know, the course of our life beyond Time’s blank horizon.  If I have often stopped to tell of a little day, or a little hour in the day, it is because I sought there a picture of Eternity, of the whole significance of the pilgrimage.

I suppose I did not know that when I first left England to go to Russia I was turning my face toward Jerusalem.  Yet it was so.  For I should never have gone direct from London to the Holy Land.  If I had attempted such a journey I should probably have failed to reach the great Shrine, for it is only a certain sort of people travelling in a certain sort of way who find admittance easily.  By the Russian peasant I was enabled to go.  It is strange to think that even when I was journeying northward to Archangel I was winding my way Jerusalem-ward in the sacred labyrinth.  And I could not have gone straight southward with the pilgrims without wandering in contrary directions first of all, for it was necessary to come into sympathy and union with the peasant soul.  There is a peasant deep down in my soul, or a peasant soul deep down in me, as well as an exterior, sensitive, cultured soul.  I had to discover that peasant, to realise myself as one of the poor in spirit to whom is the kingdom.