the good and the true which is at the root of all existence; and it is because of this fundamental marriage that all men and women are born into the desire to complete themselves by conjunction.  The symbol of sexual intercourse is a legitimate one to use in speaking of this heavenly union; indeed, we may describe the highest bliss attainable by the soul, or conceivable by the mind, as a spiritual orgasm.  Into conjugal love “are collected,” says SWEDENBORG, “all the blessednesses, blissfulnesses, delightsomenesses, pleasantnesses, and pleasures, which could possibly be conferred upon man by the Lord the Creator."[1] In another place he writes:  “Married partners [in heaven] enjoy similar intercourse with each other as in the world, but more delightful and blessed; yet without prolification, for which, or in place of which, they have spiritual prolification, which is that of love and wisdom.”  “The reason,” he adds, “why the intercourse then is more delightful and blessed is, that when conjugial love becomes of the spirit, it becomes more interior and pure, and consequently more perceptible; and every delightsomeness grows according to the perception, and grows even until its blessedness is discernible in its delightsomeness."[1b] Such love, however, he says, is rarely to be found on earth.

[1] EMANUEL SWEDENBORG:  The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugial Love (trans. by A. H. SEARLE, 1891), SE 68.

[1b] EMANUEL SWEDENBORG:  Op. cit., SE 51.

A learned Japanese speaks with approval of Idealism as a “dream where sensuousness and spirituality find themselves to be blood brothers or sisters."[2] It is a statement which involves either the grossest and most dangerous error, or the profoundest truth, according to the understanding of it.  Woman is a road whereby man travels either to God or the devil.  The problem of sex is a far deeper problem than appears at first sight, involving mysteries both the direst and most holy.  It is by no means a fantastic hypothesis that the inmost mystery of what a certain school of mystics calls “the Secret Tradition” was a sexual one.  At any rate, the fact that some of those, at least, to whom alchemy connoted a mystical process, were alive to the profound spiritual significance of sex, renders of double interest what they have to intimate of the achievement of the Magnum Opus in man.

[2] YONE NOGUCHI:  The Spirit of Japanese Art (1915), p. 37.

XI

ROGER BACON:  AN APPRECIATION

IT has been said that “a prophet is not without honour, save in his own country.”  Thereto might be added, “and in his own time”; for, whilst there is continuity in time, there is also evolution, and England of to-day, for instance, is not the same country as England of the Middle Ages.  In his own day ROGER BACON was accounted a magician, whose heretical views called for suppression by the