to be lived to reach the place where Light effulgent shines.  Death is the post-house of the journey.  A lifetime may be needed merely to gain the virtues which annul the errors of man’s preceding life.  First comes the life of suffering, whose tortures create a thirst for love.  Next the life of love and devotion to the creature, teaching devotion to the Creator,—­a life where the virtues of love, its martyrdoms, its joys followed by sorrows, its angelic hopes, its patience, its resignation, excite an appetite for things divine.  Then follows the life which seeks in silence the traces of the Word; in which the soul grows humble and charitable.  Next the life of longing; and lastly, the life of prayer.  In that is the noonday sun; there are the flowers, there the harvest!

“The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others, —­existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.  Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone life.  The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret source of human genius.  Some receive the gift of form, some the gift of numbers, others the gift of harmony.  All these gifts are steps of progress in the Path of Light.  Yes, he who possesses a single one of them touches at that point the Infinite.  Earth has divided the Word —­of which I here reveal some syllables—­into particles, she has reduced it to dust and has scattered it through her works, her dogmas, her poems.  If some impalpable grain shines like a diamond in a human work, men cry:  ‘How grand! how true! how glorious!’ That fragment vibrates in their souls and wakes a presentiment of heaven:  to some, a melody that weans from earth; to others, the solitude that draws to God.  To all, whatsoever sends us back upon ourselves, whatsoever strikes us down and crushes us, lifts or abases us,—­that is but a syllable of the Divine Word.

“When a human soul draws its first furrow straight, the rest will follow surely.  One thought borne inward, one prayer uplifted, one suffering endured, one echo of the Word within us, and our souls are forever changed.  All ends in God; and many are the ways to find Him by walking straight before us.  When the happy day arrives in which you set your feet upon the Path and begin your pilgrimage, the world will know nothing of it; earth no longer understands you; you no longer understand each other.  Men who attain a knowledge of these things, who lisp a few syllables of the Word, often have not where to lay their head; hunted like beasts they perish on the scaffold, to the joy of assembled peoples, while Angels open to them the gates of heaven.  Therefore, your destiny is a secret between yourself and God, just as love is a secret between two hearts.  You may be the buried treasure, trodden under the feet of men thirsting for gold yet all-unknowing that you are there beneath them.