thoughts.  I became aware that though he was indeed suffering from overwork, yet that his enforced rest only removed the mental distraction of his work, and left his mind free to revive a whole troop of painful thoughts.  He had been a man of strong personal ambitions, and had for twenty years been endeavouring to realise them.  Now a sense of the comparative worthlessness of his aims had come upon him.  He had despised and slighted other emotions; and his mind had in consequence drifted away like a boat into a bitter and barren sea.  He was a lonely man, and he was feeling that he had done ill in not multiplying human emotions and relations.  He reflected much upon the way in which he had neglected and despised his home affections, while he had formed no ties of his own.  Now, too, his career seemed to him at an end, and he had nothing to look forward to but a maimed and invalided life of solitude and failure.  Many of his thoughts I could not discern at all—­the mist, so to speak, involved them—­while many were obscure to me.  When he thought about scenes and people whom I had never known, the thought loomed shapeless and dark; but when he thought, as he often did, about his school and university days, and about his home circle, all of which scenes were familiar to me, I could read his mind with perfect clearness.  At the bottom of all lay a sense of deep disappointment and resentment.  He doubted the justice of God, and blamed himself but little for his miseries.  It was a sad experience at first, because he was falling day by day into more hopeless dejection; while he refused the pathetic overtures of sympathy which the relations in whose house he was—­a married sister with her husband and children—­offered him.  He bore himself with courtesy and consideration, but he was so much worn with fatigue and despondency that he could not take any initiative.  But I became aware very gradually that he was learning the true worth and proportion of things—­and the months which passed so heavily for him brought him perceptions of the value of which he was hardly aware.  Let me say that it was now that the incredible swiftness of time in the spiritual region made itself felt for me.  A month of his sufferings passed to me, contemplating them, like an hour.

I found to my surprise that his thoughts of myself were becoming more frequent; and one day when he was turning over some old letters and reading a number of mine, it seemed to me that his spirit almost recognised my presence in the words which came to his lips, “It seems like yesterday!” I then became blessedly aware that I was actually helping him, and that the very intentness of my own thought was quickening his own.

I discussed the whole case very closely and carefully with one of our instructors, who set me right on several points and made the whole state of things clear to me.

I said to him, “One thing bewilders me; it would almost seem that a man’s work upon earth constituted an interruption and a distraction from spiritual influences.  It cannot surely be that people in the body should avoid employment, and give themselves to secluded meditation?  If the soul grows fast in sadness and despondency, it would seem that one should almost have courted sorrow on earth; and yet I cannot believe that to be the case.”