Money getting in the mines, earth depths.  All manufactories that require raging and continuous flame; ships to sail, and conquer water spirits; electrical and etherial forces that move in the air currents.  These are the soulless, irresponsible “goblins” and “gnomes,” “Fire spirits” and “ignes fatui” of the nether world.  All human beings who progress at all have to deal with one or more of these forces.  Beginning in blind ignorance, through struggle, the mortal will is developed and the mere animal man has set his foot upon a low rung of the ladder of the ascending series.  Next, man has to deal with the primal races.  The “Missing link” which will never be found save at the “threshold” where it combines its forces with those of man’s other natural enemies, and keeps jealous watch and ward at every point of egress of the soul which seeks to enlarge its domain.  Finally the will of man, with its long heredity of war with these potentialities, “at enmity with God,” resisting the divine; even as these have striven to hold him in a perpetual slavery, is in its last struggle.  The vast aggregation of human will, set free from the clog of the flesh, knowing nothing of the divine, seeing no guiding light, combines its forces, and commingles its powers with whatever its endless tentacles can reach.  These are the powers and principalities of the air.  These are the demons, “bad spirits,” “devils” and “familiars” of the literature of the ages, and the presiding geniuses of many a phenomenon resulting from modern research into the mysteries of nature.  As their intelligence exceeds that of the underlying grades, so just in that degree is their power increased, and used, to block the gateway that opens upon the path.  Their abodes lie in outer darkness, or are illumined only by flashes of fictitious, and evanescent light from the expiring embers of earthly exhalations, and the phosphorescent gleams of decaying forms.  The soul that has received an illumination from the Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, yet none can escape these watchful ones.

“Here eyes do regard you in eternity’s stillness.”  “Choose well; your choice is brief, but yet endless.”  The winged fiend, the “Appolyon,” must be met and settled with at every turn of the way that leads to the kingdom which the Christ came to establish, and whose best name is “peace.”  In this grade, love finds no home, but its great prototype, the lust of the flesh, stealing ever the livery of heaven, lures on tender souls to their sad undoing.

By help of divine love alone can the soul journey safely onward and upward through this great concentrated, immediately-environing earth grade.  It is solidly compact, sleepless and untiring, seeking ceaselessly whom it may win to its realm.  It is the unrecognized longing of the soul for restoration to its divine heritage of love.

EXPERIENCE.