in this workaday world have the courage to pass successfully, but I
know that the masses of the people who drift restlessly to and fro
upon the surface of this planet, ever seeking for comfort in various
forms of religion and too often finding none, will not listen to any
spiritual truth unless it is conveyed to them, as though they were
children, in the form of a 'story.' I am not the heroine of the
tale--though I have narrated it (more or less as told to me) in the
first person singular, because it seemed to me simpler and more
direct. She to whom the perfect comprehension of happiness has come
with an equally perfect possession of love, is one out of a few who
are seeking what she has found. Many among the world's greatest
mystics and philosophers have tried for the prizes she has won,--for
the world possesses Plato, the Bible and Christ, but in its apparent
present ways of living has learned little or nothing from the three,
so that other would-be teachers may well despair of carrying
persuasion where such mighty predecessors have seemingly failed. The
serious and REAL things of life are nowadays made subjects for
derision rather than reverence;--then, again, there is unhappily an
alarmingly increasing majority of weak-minded and degenerate
persons, born of drunken, diseased or vicious parents, who are
mentally unfit for the loftier forms of study, and in whom the mere
act of thought-concentration would be dangerous and likely to upset
their mental balance altogether; while by far the larger half of the
social community seek to avoid the consideration of anything that is
not exactly suited to their tastes. Some of our most respected
social institutions are nothing but so many self-opinionated and
unconscious oppositions to the Law of Nature which is the Law of
God,--and thus it often happens that when obstinate humanity
persists in considering its own ideas of Right and Wrong superior to
the Eternal Decrees which have been visibly presented through Nature