where thought expends itself on erring science, where mind wearies at
last of human language? for, when Matter is exhausted, Spirit enters.
Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he
can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude
whose starry plains are but the vestibule of Spiritual Worlds? He
feels his way amid the void, makes trial of nothingness, and then at
last his eyes revert upon the Path. Then follow other existences,--all
to be lived to reach the place where Light effulgent shines. Death is
the post-house of the journey. A lifetime may be needed merely to gain
the virtues which annul the errors of man's preceding life. First
comes the life of suffering, whose tortures create a thirst for love.
Next the life of love and devotion to the creature, teaching devotion
to the Creator,--a life where the virtues of love, its martyrdoms, its
joys followed by sorrows, its angelic hopes, its patience, its
resignation, excite an appetite for things divine. Then follows the
life which seeks in silence the traces of the Word; in which the soul
grows humble and charitable. Next the life of longing; and lastly, the
life of prayer. In that is the noonday sun; there are the flowers,
there the harvest!

"The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the
invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others,
--existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory
for spiritual things. Thought alone holds the tradition of the bygone
life. The endless legacy of the past to the present is the secret
source of human genius. Some receive the gift of form, some the gift
of numbers, others the gift of harmony. All these gifts are steps of
progress in the Path of Light. Yes, he who possesses a single one of
them touches at that point the Infinite. Earth has divided the Word
--of which I here reveal some syllables--into particles, she has reduced