The interior life from the standpoint of the mystics. An address delivered before the London spiritualist alliance ... December 16th, 1890

and jealousy. It takes nothing from the humanity around us that can be given to humanity. Like the solitary inspiration of a Scald An ancient Scandinavian poet-composer., its ultimate result for the world may prove better than a long lifetime of ordinary social interaction. Suspending communication with external and phenomenal things is the means to a higher work: the creation of a connection with the absolute realities that transcend them.

According to Cornelius Agrippa A 16th-century German polymath and occult writer., we must learn how to leave the "intellectual multitude" if we wish to reach the "super-intellectual and essential unity," for that unity is "free from all many-sidedness, and is the very fountain of good and truth." He assures us that "we must ascend to sciences in which, although there is a great variety, there is no conflict, until at last we reach that one all-inclusive science which assumes everything below it, while nothing can be assumed beyond it." Above even this peak of achievement, and only there, he tells us, is the positive knowledge of a pure intellect. Therefore—and this is how he ends—"let us reach the first unity, from which there is a union in all things, through that one thing which is the flower of our essence; which we finally reach when, avoiding the crowd of thoughts, we rise into our own unity, are made one, and act with a single purpose."

Solitude is essential for such work. Bringing out these superior conditions is best accomplished among the ancient grandeurs of Nature: in mountain strongholds, in the divine desolation of the wilderness, or, as the Mystics themselves tell us, in the middle of the open sea. For the majesties and splendors of the outside world are the threshold of unknown grandeurs. The gorgeous glowing of the sunset speaks in "tongues of fire" original: "Pentecostal tongues"; a reference to the biblical event where the Holy Spirit descended as tongues of fire. of revelation, but this does not exclude the all-permeating service of the Night, which speaks a fiat Lux Latin: "Let there be light." to the strong soul. Dies diei eructat verbum, et

nox nocti indicat scientiam. original: "Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge." (Psalm 19:2) We are advised in this way by the voice of one of our enlighteners, Thomas Vaughan A 17th-century Welsh philosopher and alchemist who wrote under the name Eugenius Philalethes.—the most transparent of all English Mystics and the brother of "the Silurist" Henry Vaughan, a famous religious poet., the sweetest and most silver-tongued of our devotional singers: "Move yourself to the fields, where all things are green with the breath of God and fresh with the powers of Heaven... Sometimes you may walk in groves, which, being full of majesty, will greatly advance the soul; and sometimes by clear, active rivers, for by such (say the mystic poets) did Apollo meditate:

'All things that Apollo spoke in his musing
The blessed Eurotas A river in Greece associated with Apollo. heard.'"

So also the most advanced inspirational poet of our own spiritual era, Thomas Lake Harris An American spiritualist, prophet, and poet (1823–1906)., has revealed to us the spiritual ministry of night, when more subtle thoughts touch

"The inner mind,
And unbind all the shackled inner wings.
When an infinite sight is born in the spirit;
When we see, as the sun sees, the creation below;
And we thrill, as the earth thrills, with Heaven's warm glow;
And we move, as the light moves, from world to world;
And we change, as the skies change, when morning begins;
And we breathe the sweet breath of the angel's delight,
Until our thoughts open, like roses, in fragrance and light;
Until within us, as around us, the Heavens are spread,
And our thoughts and our loves, like twin angels, are wed."

It will be seen, therefore, that the first reward of the interior life is the "seeing sense" of the poet—the possession of that strange tool of interior alchemy which dissolves the natural world to discover within it a new and higher reality.