the heart. But the end of life is not comfort but
divine being. We do not regard the life which closed in the martyr's
fire as ended ignobly. The spiritual philosophy which separates
human emotions and ideas, and declares some to be secular and others
spiritual, is to blame. There is no meditation which if prolonged will
not bring us to the same world where religion would carry us, and if a
flower in the wall will lead us to all knowledge, so the understanding
of the peculiar nature of one half of humanity will bring us far on our
journey to the sacred deep. I believe it was this wise understanding
which in the ancient world declared the embodied spirit in man to be
influenced more by the Divine Mind and in woman by the Mighty Mother, by
which nature in its spiritual aspect was understood. In this philosophy,
Boundless Being, when manifested, revealed itself in two forms of life,
spirit and substance; and the endless evolution of its divided rays had
as its root impulse the desire to return to that boundless being. By
many ways blindly or half consciously the individual life strives to
regain its old fullness. The spirit seeks union with nature to pass
from the life of vision into Pure being; and nature, conscious that its
grosser forms are impermanent, is for ever dissolving and leading
its votary to a more distant shrine. "Nature is timid like a woman,"
declares an Indian scripture. "She reveals herself shyly and withdraws
again." All this metaphysic will not appear out of place if we regard
women as influenced beyond herself and her conscious life for spiritual
ends. I do not enter a defense of the loveless coquette, but the woman
who has a natural delight in awakening love in men is priestess of
a divinity than which there is none mightier among the rulers of the
heavens. Through her eyes, her laugh, in all her motions, there is
expressed more than she is conscious of herself. The Mighty Mother
through the woman is kindling a symbol of herself in the spirit, and
through that symbol she breathes her secret life into the heart, so that
it is fed from within and is drawn to herself. We remember that with
Dante, the image of a woman became at last the purified vesture of his
spirit through which the mysteries were revealed. We are for ever making
our souls with effort and pain, and shaping them into images which
reveal or are voiceless according to their degree; and the man whose
spirit has been obsessed by a beauty so lo