On this I raised the fabric of my own “Dream City,” and sought to elucidate some of the meaning of that great text in Ecclesiastes which contains in itself all the philosophy of the ages:  “That which Hath Been is Now; and that which is To Be hath already Been; and God requireth that which is Past.”

The book, however, so my publisher Mr. Bentley told me in a series of letters which I still possess, and which show how keen was his own interest in my work, was ’entirely over the heads of the general public.’  His opinion was, no doubt, correct, as “Ardath” still remains the least ‘popular’ of any book I have ever written.  Nevertheless it brought me the unsought and very generous praise of the late Poet Laureate, Alfred Lord Tennyson, as well as the equally unsought good opinion and personal friendship of the famous statesman, William Ewart Gladstone, while many of the better-class literary journals vied with one another in according me an almost enthusiastic eulogy.  Such authorities as the “Athenaeum” and “Spectator” praised the whole conception and style of the work, the latter journal going as far as to say that I had beaten Beckford’s famous “Vathek” on its own ground.

Whatever may now be the consensus of opinion on its merits or demerits, I know and feel it to be one of my most worthy attempts, even though it is not favoured by the million.  It does not appeal to anything ‘of the moment’ merely, because there are very few people who can or will understand that if the Soul or ‘Radia’ of a human being is so forgetful of its highest origin as to cling to its human Self only (events the hero of “Ardath” clung to the Shadow of his Former Self and to the illusory pictures of that Former Self’s pleasures and vices and vanities) then the way to the eternal Happier Progress is barred.  There is yet another intention in this book which seems to be missed by the casual reader, namely,—­That each human soul is a germ of separate and individual spiritual existence.  Even as no two leaves are exactly alike on any tree, and no two blades of grass are precisely similar, so no two souls resemble each other, but are wholly different, endowed with different gifts and different capacities.  Individuality is strongly insisted upon in material Nature.  And why?  Because material Nature is merely the reflex or mirror of the more strongly insistent individuality of psychic form.  Again, psychic form is generated from a divinely eternal psychic substance,—­a ‘radia’ or emanation of God’s own Being which, as it progresses onward through endless aeons of constantly renewed vitality, grows more and more powerful, changing its shape often, but never its everlasting composition and quality.  Therefore, all the experiences of the ‘Soul’ or psychic form, from its first entrance into active consciousness, whether in this world or in other worlds, are attracted to itself by its own inherent volition, and work together to make it what it is now and what it will be hereafter.