picking cinders and arranging them, and, growing closer, as I ponder, I become aware that he is laying down in gritty lines the walls of a house, the mansion of his dream.  Here spread along the pavement are large rooms, these for his friends, and a tiny room in the centre, that is his own.  So his thought plays.  Just then I catch a glimpse of the corduroy trousers of a passing workman, and a heavy boot crushes through the cinders.  I feel the pain in the child’s heart as he shrinks back, his little love-lit house of dreams all rudely shattered.  Ah, poor child, building the City Beautiful out of a few cinders, yet nigher, truer in intent than many a stately, gold-rich palace reared by princes, thou wert not forgotten by that mighty spirit who lives through the falling of empires, whose home has been in many a ruined heart.  Surely it was to bring comfort to hearts like thine that that most noble of all meditations was ordained by the Buddha.  “He lets his mind pervade one quarter of the world with thoughts of Love, and so the second, and so the third, and so the fourth.  And thus the whole wide world, above, below, around, and everywhere, does he continue to pervade with heart of Love far-reaching, grown great, and beyond measure.”

The love, though the very fairy breath of life, should by itself and so imparted have a sustaining power some may question, not those who have felt the sunlight fall from distant fiends who think of them; but, to make clearer how it seems to me to act, I say that love, Eros, is a being.  It is more than a power of the soul, though it is that also; it has a universal life of its own, and just as the dark heaving waters do not know what jewel lights they reflect with blinding radiance, so the soul, partially absorbing and feeling the ray of Eros within it, does not know that often a part of its nature nearer to the sun of love shines with a brilliant light to other eyes than its own.  Many people move unconscious of their won charm, unknowing of the beauty and power they seem to others to impart.  It is some past attainment of the soul, a jewel won in some old battle which it may have forgotten, but none the less this gleams on its tiara and the star-flame inspires others to hope and victory.

If is true here than many exert a spiritual influence they are unconscious of, it is still truer of the spheres within.  Once the soul has attained to any possession like love, or persistent will, or faith, or a power of thought, it comes into psychic contact with others who are struggling for these very powers.  The attainment of any of these means that the soul is able to absorb and radiate some of the diviner elements of being.  The soul may or may not be aware of the position it is placed in and its new duties, but yet that Living Light, having found a way into the being of any one person, does not rest there, but sends its rays and extends its influence on and on to illumine the darkness of another nature.