And now that the soul had divined this secret, the shadowy shining which was woven in bonds of union between it and its fellow-lights grew clearer; and a multitude of these strands were, so it seemed, strengthened and placed in its keeping:  along these it was to send the message of the wisdom and the love which were the secret sweetness of its own being.  Then a spiritual tragedy began, infinitely more pathetic than the old desolation, because it was brought about by the very nobility of the spirit.  This soul, shedding its love like rays of glory, seemed itself the centre of a ring of wounding spears:  it sent forth love and the arrowy response came hate-impelled:  it whispered peace and was answered by the clash of rebellion:  and to all this for defence it could only bare more openly its heart that a profounder love from the Mother Nature might pass through upon the rest.  I knew this was what a teacher, who wrote long ago, meant when he said:  “Put on the whole armour of god,” which is love and endurance, for the truly divine children of the Flame are not armed otherwise:  and of those protests, sent up in ignorance or rebellion against the whisper of the wisdom, I saw that some melted in the fierce and tender heat of the heart, and there came in their stead a golden response which made closer the ties, and drew these souls upward to an understanding and to share in the overshadowing nature:  and this is part of the plan of the Great Alchemist, whereby the red ruby of the heart is transmuted into the tenderer light of the opal; for the beholding of love made bare acts like the flame of the furnace, and the dissolving passions, through an anguish of remorse, the lightnings of pain, and through an adoring pity, are changed into the image they contemplate and melt in the ecstasy of self-forgetful love, the spirit which lit the thorn-crowned brows, which perceived only in its last agony the retribution due to its tormentors, and cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Now although the love of the few may alleviate the hurt due to the ignorance of the mass, it is not in the power of anyone to withstand for ever this warfare; for by the perpetual wounding of the inner nature it is so wearied that the spirit must withdraw from a tabernacle grown too frail to support the increase of light within and the jarring of the demoniac nature without:  and at length comes the call which means, for a while, release, and a deep rest in regions beyond the paradise of lesser souls.  So, withdrawn into the Divine Darkness, vanished the Light of my dream.  And now it seemed as if this wonderful weft of souls intertwining as one being must come to naught; and all those who through the gloom had nourished a longing for the light would stretch out hands in vain for guidance:  but that I did not understand the love of the Mother, and that although few, there is no decaying of her heroic brood; for, as the seer of old caught at the mantle of him who went up in the fiery chariot, so another took up the burden and gathered the shining strands together:  and to this sequence of spiritual guides there is no ending.