of religion and too often finding none, will not listen to any spiritual truth unless it is conveyed to them, as though they were children, in the form of a ‘story.’  I am not the heroine of the tale—­though I have narrated it (more or less as told to me) in the first person singular, because it seemed to me simpler and more direct.  She to whom the perfect comprehension of happiness has come with an equally perfect possession of love, is one out of a few who are seeking what she has found.  Many among the world’s greatest mystics and philosophers have tried for the prizes she has won,—­for the world possesses Plato, the Bible and Christ, but in its apparent present ways of living has learned little or nothing from the three, so that other would-be teachers may well despair of carrying persuasion where such mighty predecessors have seemingly failed.  The serious and real things of life are nowadays made subjects for derision rather than reverence;—­then, again, there is unhappily an alarmingly increasing majority of weak-minded and degenerate persons, born of drunken, diseased or vicious parents, who are mentally unfit for the loftier forms of study, and in whom the mere act of thought-concentration would be dangerous and likely to upset their mental balance altogether; while by far the larger half of the social community seek to avoid the consideration of anything that is not exactly suited to their tastes.  Some of our most respected social institutions are nothing but so many self-opinionated and unconscious oppositions to the Law of Nature which is the Law of God,—­and thus it often happens that when obstinate humanity persists in considering its own ideas of Right and Wrong superior to the Eternal Decrees which have been visibly presented through Nature since the earliest dawn of creation, a faulty civilisation sets in and is presently swept back upon its advancing wheels, and forced to begin again with primal letters of learning.  In the same way a faulty Soul, an imperfect individual Spirit, is likewise compelled to return to school and resume the study of the lessons it has failed to put into practice.  Nevertheless, people cannot bear to have it plainly said or written down, as it has been said and written down over and over again any time since the world began, that all the corrupt government, wars, slaveries, plagues, diseases and despairs that afflict humanity are humanity’s own sins taking vengeance upon the sinners, ’even unto the third and fourth generation.’  And this not out of Divine cruelty, but because of Divine Law which from the first ordained that Evil shall slay Itself, leaving room only for Good.  Men and women alike will scarce endure to read any book which urges this unalterable fact upon their attention.  They pronounce the author ‘arrogant’ or ’presuming to lay down the law’;—­and they profess to be scandalised by an encounter with honesty.  Nevertheless, the faithful writer of things as they Are will not be disturbed by the aspect of things as they Seem.