Harikar, or developed soul, is the natural sequence of the
development of the soul and intellect, achieving the supreme virtue of
spiritual perfection, or dominion of the passions of the body and the
forces of nature. Love was the one great end of our religion, for life
is love."

"I value your creed," I continued, "to the fullest extent. I value the
idea that every intellect shall enfold a soul. You practise the
doctrine that hopeless love is that phase of the passion that contains
the most delirious possibilities of joy, yet, allow me to ask, have
you never discovered that there may be disappointments for even such
guarded emotions as yours? Are your neophytes perfectly happy? We
find, in the outer world at least, that no state or condition in life
is perfectly pleasurable. Their joys die of their own _ennui_ if for
no other cause. We find happiness like a flower; it has its period of
bloom and decay. The more intoxicating the beauty the shorter its
life. Happiness long continued grows common, fades and dies. Then
again the human soul is always in a fever of unrest. It always thinks
what is beyond its reach is liberty. As one of our poets has expressed
it:

"'Oh, give me liberty!
For even were a paradise itself my prison,
Still would I long to leap the crystal walls!'"

As I spoke I saw that the goddess was an eager listener to my words.
Was it possible that she might have an idea that even Egyplosis might
indeed be a prison? But, then, her position, her vows, recalled to her
the fact that she was love's _religieuse_, an indissoluble part of the
temple of love itself.

The goddess replied, that sometimes impatient spirits had entered the
palace, but any incorrigible cases of insubordination were either
imprisoned in the fortress beneath the palace or were expelled into
the outer world. The neophytes entered the temple college while under
twenty years of age. Each soul, thereafter mingling freely with five
thousand of the opposite sex, chooses in a month its counterpart for
life, thus forming a complete circle. The choice must be approved by a
council of "Soul Inquisitors" who, before the lifelong union is made,
see that both possess all the elements that will produce a high, holy
and pure blending of thought, feeling, emotion, joys spiritual and
intellectual, whose every breath will be an ecstasy, and at the same
time possess reverence for each other and the power of resistance to
pas