ns of his health and power.

His love came back--as in lightning, his love came back! Not the love
of one that he had known--that was good, inevitable, even the restless
agony of it. Through the love of one, comes the love of many.... But
this was love of the world! It surged over, through him--like the fire
of the burning bush--that did not devour.... He had abstained from evil
before, but held the taste for certain evils. _Now the taste was
gone_--for every fleshly thing. Wanting nothing, he could love, indeed.

* * * * *

How strange and wonderful! All that he had thought before, and
expressed in New York, had seemed his very own--the realizations of
Andrew Bedient--but this night his every thought, almost, had a
parallel, from one or another of the great ones who had gone this high
way before.... He perceived that he had been old in self-consciousness,
so, that, in a way, his New York utterances were stamped with his own
individuality. In this greater consciousness he was a child; its glory
was beyond words. He could only echo the attempts of those whose lips
had faltered with ecstasy.

_If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are
passed away; behold, they are become new._

Such was Paul's clear saying.... The difference between Andrew Bedient
at this hour and the self he had been was great as that between the
simple consciousness of the ox and the self-consciousness of man.

This was the borderland of Gautama's Nirvana; this the Living Water,
Jesus offered to the woman at the well; this the Holy Ghost that
appeared unto the Hebrew saints and prophets--Moses, Gideon, Samuel,
Isaiah, Stephen; this the genius of Paul, the ecstasy of Plotinus, the
paradise of Behmen, the heavenly light of St. John of the Cross; this,
the Beatrice of Dante, the Gabriel of Mahomet, the Master Peter of
Roger Bacon, the Seraphita of Balzac, the radiant companion of Whitman,
and the _I_ of Edward Carpenter.

The light would have killed one who had not integrated spiritual light
to reflect it. The light of the Illuminati is terrible to eyes filled
with evil. This was the "smile of the Universe" that Dante saw.... He,
Andrew Bedient, loved infinitely and was infinitely loved. The words of
a hundred saints echoed in his consciousness--and out of them all came
this command:

_Make men to know that this which has come to you, will come to them.
The few have gone before you, but the ma