The “Gates of Gold” represent the entrance to that realm of the soul unknowable through the physical perceptions, and the purpose of this work is to indicate some of the steps necessary to reach their threshold.  Through its extraordinary beauty of style and the clearness of its statement it will appeal to a wider portion of the public than most works of a Theosophical character.  It speaks to the Western World in its own language, and in this fact lies much of its value.

Those of us who have been longing for something “practical” will find it here, while it will probably come into the hands of thousands who know little or nothing of Theosophy, and thus meet wants deeply felt though unexpressed.  There are also doubtless many, we fancy, who will be carried far along in its pages by its resistless logic until they encounter something which will give a rude shock to some of their old conceptions, which they have imagined as firmly based as upon a rock—­a shock which may cause them to draw back in alarm, but from which they will not find it so easy to recover, and which will be likely to set them thinking seriously.

The titles of the five chapters of the book are, respectively, “The Search for Pleasure,” “The Mystery of Threshold,” “The Initial Effort,” “The Meaning of Pain,” and “The Secret of Strength.”  Instead of speculating upon mysteries that lie at the very end of man’s destiny, and which cannot be approached by any manner of conjecture, the work very sensibly takes up that which lies next at hand, that which constitutes the first step to be taken if we are ever to take a second one, and teaches us its significance.  At the outset we must cope with sensation and learn its nature and meaning.  An important teaching of Light on the Path has been misread by many.  We are not enjoined to kill out sensation, but to “kill out desire for sensation,” which is something quite different.  “Sensation, as we obtain it through the physical body, affords us all that induces us to live in that shape,” says this work.  The problem is, to extract the meaning which it holds for us.  That is what existence is for.  “If men will but pause and consider what lessons they have learned from pleasure and pain, much might be guessed of that strange thing which causes these effects.”

“The question concerning results seemingly unknowable, that concerning the life beyond the Gates,” is presented as one that has been asked throughout the ages, coming at the hour “when the flower of civilization had blown to its full, and when its petals are but slackly held together,” the period when man reaches the greatest physical development of his cycle.  It is then that in the distance a great glittering is seen, before which many drop their eyes bewildered and dazzled, though now and then one is found brave enough to gaze fixedly on this glittering, and to decipher something of the shape within it.  “Poets and philosophers, thinkers and teachers, all those who are the ’elder brothers of the race’—­have beheld this sight from time to time, and some among them have recognized in the bewildering glitter the outlines of the Gates of Gold.”