“Seek to understand yourself, and that will draw others to you.  It matters but little whether we are understood in this world, when we think of the long eternity before us.  There is danger of becoming morbid on that point.  We lose time and ground in many such meditations.  Our gaze becomes too much inward, and we lose sight of life’s grand panorama while thus closed in.  We can see ourselves most clearly in others; our weakness and our strength.  We need to go out, more than to look within.  Do you not in conversing with me feel yourself more, than you do when alone?”

“I do.  Another essence, or quality of life mingling with our own gives us our own more perfectly.  Will all this power go with us to the other world, or do we leave much behind?”

“Nothing but the husk-the dust is left here.  Whatever is, shall be.  Should you or I pass on, to-day, we should still preserve our individuality of thought and being.”

“And our loves will unfold there, and we be free, think you, to associate with whom we love?”

“I have no doubt of it in my own mind, but can scarce expect another to feel the conviction as I do.  We shall be better understood there.  Here we have inharmonious natures of our own and others to contend with.  These are given to us and are brought about us without any ability in ourselves to accept or reject.  Our surroundings are not always what we would wish them, and few find rest or harmony of soul while here.  And yet all this is necessary for proper unfoldment and development, else it would not be.  Few weary pilgrims reach in this life the many mansions prepared for the soul; few find their fullness of soul-enjoyment.  I have seen some of these weary ones as they entered the other world and were led to places of rest.  As they caught a single glimpse of the peace and rest awaiting them, their faces glowed with the light of a divine transfiguration; yet they knew that the bliss they had been permitted to look upon, and to hope for, could be theirs only as they were developed into a state of perfect appreciation of it.  Even so the person who enters the most fully and understandingly into our own feelings, grasps and holds the most of us.  I am yours and you are mine just so far as we can fathom and comprehend each other.”

“I had never thought of that before.  How little do they who claim us as their own, know of the existence of this law; and yet the more I consider it, the more do I see its beauty, its truth, and the harmony of all its parts.”

Dawn was greatly pleased in seeing how readily he recognized her position, and continued: 

“The relation which such claimants bear to us is one purely external in its nature, and oft-times painful.  It is a kind of property ownership which ought to be banished from social life.  It should be cast out and have no place nor lot with us, for those higher and divine principles cannot dwell with us until these things are regarded as of the past, and now worthless.”