s more delightful and
blessed is, that when conjugial love becomes of the spirit, it becomes
more interior and pure, and consequently more perceptible; and every
delightsomeness grows according to the perception, and grows even until
its blessedness is discernible in its delightsomeness."(1b) Such love,
however, he says, is rarely to be found on earth.

(1) EMANUEL SWEDENBORG: _The Delights of Wisdom relating to Conjugial
Love_ (trans. by A. H. SEARLE, 1891), SE 68.

(1b) EMANUEL SWEDENBORG: _Op. cit_., SE 51.

A learned Japanese speaks with approval of Idealism as a "dream where
sensuousness and spirituality find themselves to be blood brothers or
sisters."(2) It is a statement which involves either the grossest
and most dangerous error, or the profoundest truth, according to the
understanding of it. Woman is a road whereby man travels either to God
or the devil. The problem of sex is a far deeper problem than appears at
first sight, involving mysteries both the direst and most holy. It is
by no means a fantastic hypothesis that the inmost mystery of what a
certain school of mystics calls "the Secret Tradition" was a sexual
one. At any rate, the fact that some of those, at least, to whom alchemy
connoted a mystical process, were alive to the profound spiritual
significance of sex, renders of double interest what they have to
intimate of the achievement of the _Magnum Opus_ in man.

(2) YONE NOGUCHI: _The Spirit of Japanese Art_ (1915), p. 37.

XI. ROGER BACON: AN APPRECIATION

IT has been said that "a prophet is not without honour, save in his own
country." Thereto might be added, "and in his own time"; for, whilst
there is continuity in time, there is also evolution, and England of
to-day, for instance, is not the same country as England of the Middle
Ages. In his own day ROGER BACON was accounted a magician, whose
heretical views called for suppression by the Church. And for many a
long day afterwards was he mainly remembered as a co-worker in the black
art with Friar BUNGAY, who together with him constructed, by the aid of
the devil and diabolical rites, a brazen head which should possess the
power of speech--the experiment only failing through the negligence of
an assistant.(1) Such was ROGER BACON in the memory of the later Middle
Ages and many succeeding years; he was the typical alchemist, where that
term carries with it the depth of disrepute, though indeed alchemy was
for him but one, and tha