happens) it takes not only time for us to know them, but it also demands a certain instinctive receptiveness on our parts, or willingness to recognise them.  Even the risen Saviour was not at first recognised by His own disciples.  It is because I have been practically convinced of this truth, and because I have learned that life is not and never can be death, but only constant change and reinvestment of Spirit into Form, that I have presumed so far as to allude to my own faith and experience,—­a ‘personal’ touch for which I readily apologise, knowing that it cannot be interesting to the majority who would never take the trouble to shape their lives as I seek to shape mine.  Still, if there are one or two out of a million who feel as I do, that life and love are of little worth if they must end in dark nothingness, these may perhaps have the patience to come with me through the pages of a narrative which is neither ‘incidental’ nor ‘sensational’ nor anything which should pertain to the modern ‘romance’ or ‘novel,’ and which has been written because the writing of it enforced itself upon me with an insistence that would take no denial.

Perhaps there will be at least one among those who turn over this book, who will be sufficiently interested in the psychic—­that is to say the immortal and, therefore, the only real side of life—­to give a little undivided attention to the subject.  To that one I address myself and say:  Will you, to begin with, drop your burden of preconceived opinions and prejudices, whatever they are?  Will you set aside the small cares and trifles that affect your own material personality?  Will you detach yourself from your own private and particular surroundings for a space and agree to think with me?  Thinking is, I know, the hardest of all hard tasks to the modern mind.  But if you would learn, you must undertake this trouble.  If you would find the path which is made fair and brilliant by the radiance of the soul’s imperishable summer, you must not grudge time.  If I try, no matter how inadequately, to show you something of the mystic power that makes for happiness, do not shut your eyes in scorn or languor to the smallest flash of light through your darkness which may help you to a mastery of the secret.

I say again—­Will you think with me?  Will you, for instance, think of Life?  What is it?  Of Death?  What is it?  What is the primary object of Living?  What is the problem solved by Dying?  All these questions should have answer,—­for nothing is without a meaning,—­ and nothing ever has been, or ever will be, without a purpose?

In this world, apparently, and according to our surface knowledge of all physical and mental phenomena, it would seem that the chief business of humanity is to continually re-create itself.  Man exists--in his own opinion—­merely to perpetuate Man.  All the wonders of the earth, air, fire and water,—­all the sustenance drawn from the teeming bosom of Nature,—­all the progress of countless civilisations in ever recurring and repeated processional order,—­ all the sciences old and new,—­are solely to nourish, support, instruct, entertain and furnish food and employment for the tiny two-legged imp of Chance, spawned (as he himself asserts) out of gas and atoms.