How many today are satisfied with their lives or sure that they possess the truth or know whence they came when they were born or, after death, whither they are going? Yet there is a promise in our hearts and in the divine law that all that mankind has been, it shall be again, and all that we have forgone we shall recover.
We lost touch ages ago with the mighty mother, nature, and now need to go to her again, for the most part in her forests or on her hilltops or by the seashore, to find our own souls in her quiet places and to learn that all matter responds to the spiritual touch. Out beyond hearing and seeing and thinking are infinite laws that control our lives. Divine laws hold us in their keeping: immediately behind the veil of visible things, and but a little way from the consciousness of our mortal selves, are higher forces at work for our good.
They speak to the soul to make the way broad and beautiful; they speak to us at all times through the sunlit sky and the starlight. The shining silences of nature proclaim to us always the greatness of the world and the hidden grandeur of man, so that in the desert, in the deep caverns of the earth, under the heaviest weight of sorrow, "he that hath ears to hear" is never alone. Were he lost in the great waste places or in a rudderless boat on the open sea, or were he on the brink of created things and far from the world of men, he would carry within him still the kingdom of heaven and might find in his heart all the revelations for which humanity is longing.
It is the spiritual message that the world is crying for: a baptism of the spirit of the divinity of man, whereby we should be made to realize that the heavens are opening to our needs; that the light is breaking and new stars are shining; that the things we do not see are greater than the things we see -- that the heart yearns for more than we know; that nature is supremely just, and in all this grand universal scheme of being not a thought, not an aspiration, not the smallest effort is lost or wasted.
We cannot succeed unless we work with nature, who will not accept halfhearted service. We receive no answer when we call to her only in moments of dilemma or disappointment and then turn again and desert her. She has no word for the insincere or indifferent; she responds only to those whose minds are awake to the highest aims. It is as we reach out in thought to the best and noblest that her answer comes back to us. Out of the great dark surroundings of life dawns the enlightenment of the inner man when the soul of man shall speak, and we who were under the shadow of our affairs and difficulties become aware that this is indeed the gods' universe which divine laws do govern, and that nature is all friendly and humanity need not be otherwise. For there is no need for all this human quarreling and fighting and doubting: could we trust ourselves, we should trust our neighbors; could we trust our neighbors, we should trust the divine law. Then we should know that life is beautiful and true.
Fear is the basis of all discouragement. Only cultivate fearlessness in meeting the trials from without and the weaknesses within, and we cease to be alone. We attain discernment of a grand companionship ever present with us and become aware of the god "that is within you and yet without you," the Everywhere-existing whose voice we may hear, listening for it, in our own spirit, and no less in the murmur of the brooks and in the birds' chorusings. For the mystery in the heart of nature is also the mystery in the heart of man, and the same wonderful powers are in both.
The secret of life is impersonal love; impersonality wins her secrets from the Mystic Mother. If we dismiss the idea of a personal God and dismiss our own personalities with all their limitations and misgivings; if we carry our minds beyond self into the limitless, our thought into the universal order, and from the inmost recesses of our consciousness regard the universe in its magnificence until, lifted out of ourselves, we recognize within ourselves greater things than ever we have dreamed of, and draw near to inspirations unendingly beautiful and rich, and make question then as to the interpretation of it and the meaning of all these limitless rhythms of law and order that throng the immensity of space -- her answer will come back to us. We shall behold the universe as the outgrowth, the expression, of an infinite scheme proceeding from an inmost source beyond our comprehension -- the fountain, the center, the unknowable absolute Light -- flowing out from which, following the plan of evolutionary law, passing through the many lives ordained for our growth towards perfection, we are here to work out the purposes of existence.