require raging and continuous flame; ships to sail, and conquer water
spirits; electrical and etherial forces that move in the air currents.
These are the soulless, irresponsible "goblins" and "gnomes," "Fire
spirits" and "_ignes fatui_" of the nether world. All human beings who
progress at all have to deal with one or more of these forces.
Beginning in blind ignorance, through struggle, the mortal will is
developed and the mere animal man has set his foot upon a low rung of
the ladder of the ascending series. Next, man has to deal with the
primal races. The "Missing link" which will never be found save at the
"threshold" where it combines its forces with those of man's other
natural enemies, and keeps jealous watch and ward at every point of
egress of the soul which seeks to enlarge its domain. Finally the will
of man, with its long heredity of war with these potentialities, "at
enmity with God," resisting the divine; even as these have striven to
hold him in a perpetual slavery, is in its last struggle. The vast
aggregation of human will, set free from the clog of the flesh, knowing
nothing of the divine, seeing no guiding light, combines its forces,
and commingles its powers with whatever its endless tentacles can
reach. These are the powers and principalities of the air. These are
the demons, "bad spirits," "devils" and "familiars" of the literature
of the ages, and the presiding geniuses of many a phenomenon resulting
from modern research into the mysteries of nature. As their
intelligence exceeds that of the underlying grades, so just in that
degree is their power increased, and used, to block the gateway that
opens upon the path. Their abodes lie in outer darkness, or are
illumined only by flashes of fictitious, and evanescent light from the
expiring embers of earthly exhalations, and the phosphorescent gleams
of decaying forms. The soul that has received an illumination from the
Divine has in its keeping a talisman of power, yet none can escape
these watchful ones.