The glimpse of the life beyond which he had obtained appeared to him to contain the universe; and on his fragment of experience he built up a theory to include all life, and refused progress beyond that state or any possibility outside it.  This is only another form of the weary treadmill.  But Swedenborg stands foremost in the crowd of witnesses to the fact that the Golden Gates exist and can be seen from the heights of thought, and he has cast us a faint surge of sensation from their threshold.

III

When once one has considered the meaning of those Gates, it is evident that there is no other way out of this form of life except through them.  They only can admit man to the place where he becomes the fruit of which manhood is the blossom.  Nature is the kindest of mothers to those who need her; she never wearies of her children or desires them to lessen in multitude.  Her friendly arms open wide to the vast throng who desire birth and to dwell in forms; and while they continue to desire it, she continues to smile a welcome.  Why, then, should she shut her doors on any?  When one life in her heart has not worn out a hundredth part of the soul’s longing for sensation such as it finds there, what reason can there be for its departure to any other place?  Surely the seeds of desire spring up where the sower has sown them.  This seems but reasonable; and on this apparently self-evident fact the Indian mind has based its theory of re-incarnation, of birth and re-birth in matter, which has become so familiar a part of Eastern thought as no longer to need demonstration.  The Indian knows it as the Western knows that the day he is living through is but one of many days which make up the span of a man’s life.  This certainty which is possessed by the Eastern with regard to natural laws that control the great sweep of the soul’s existence is simply acquired by habits of thought.  The mind of many is fixed on subjects which in the West are considered unthinkable.  Thus it is that the East has produced the great flowers of the spiritual growth of humanity.  On the mental steps of a million men Buddha passed through the Gates of Gold; and because a great crowd pressed about the threshold he was able to leave behind him words which prove that those Gates will open.

CHAPTER III

THE INITIAL EFFORT

I

It is very easily seen that there is no one point in a man’s life or experience where he is nearer the soul of things than at any other.  That soul, the sublime essence, which fills the air with a burnished glow, is there, behind the Gates it colors with itself.  But that there is no one pathway to it is immediately perceived from the fact that this soul must from its very nature be universal.  The Gates of Gold do not admit to any special place; what they do is to