“‘In these blest souls are blent,’ my guide discoursed, ’far higher thoughts, and sweeter plaints than thine.  Rude joy were discord here.  And as a sudden shout in thy hushed mountain-passes brings down the awful avalanche; so one note of laughter here, might start some white and silent world.’

“Then low I murmured:—­’Is their’s, oh guide! no happiness supreme? their state still mixed?  Sigh these yet to know?  Can these sin?’

“Then I heard:—­’No mind but Oro’s can know all; no mind that knows not all can be content; content alone approximates to happiness.  Holiness comes by wisdom; and it is because great Oro is supremely wise, that He’s supremely holy.  But as perfect wisdom can be only Oro’s; so, perfect holiness is his alone.  And whoso is otherwise than perfect in his holiness, is liable to sin.

“’And though death gave these beings knowledge, it also opened other mysteries, which they pant to know, and yet may learn.  And still they fear the thing of evil; though for them, ’tis hard to fall.  Thus hoping and thus fearing, then, their’s is no state complete.  And since Oro is past finding out, and mysteries ever open into mysteries beyond; so, though these beings will for aye progress in wisdom and in good; yet, will they never gain a fixed beatitude.  Know, then, oh mortal Mardian! that when translated hither, thou wilt but put off lowly temporal pinings, for angel and eternal aspirations.  Start not:  thy human joy hath here no place:  no name.

“Still, I mournful mused; then said:—­’Many Mardians live, who have no aptitude for Mardian lives of thought:  how then endure more earnest, everlasting, meditations?’

“‘Such have their place,’ I heard.

“’Then low I moaned, ’And what, oh! guide! of those who, living thoughtless lives of sin, die unregenerate; no service done to Oro or to Mardian?’

“‘They, too, have their place,’ I heard; ’but ’tis not here.  And Mardian! know, that as your Mardian lives are long preserved through strict obedience to the organic law, so are your spiritual lives prolonged by fast keeping of the law of mind.  Sin is death.’

“‘Ah, then,’ yet lower moan made I; ’and why create the germs that sin and suffer, but to perish?’

“‘That,’ breathed my guide; ’is the last mystery which underlieth all the rest.  Archangel may not fathom it; that makes of Oro the everlasting mystery he is; that to divulge, were to make equal to himself in knowledge all the souls that are; that mystery Oro guards; and none but him may know.’

“Alas! were it recalled, no words have I to tell of all that now my guide discoursed, concerning things unsearchable to us.  My sixth sense which he opened, sleeps again, with all the wisdom that it gained.

“Time passed; it seemed a moment, might have been an age; when from high in the golden haze that canopied this heaven, another angel came; its vans like East and West; a sunrise one, sunset the other.  As silver-fish in vases, so, in his azure eyes swam tears unshed.