(Lecture delivered April 5, 1931)
CONTENTS: Easter a spiritual event. — The Ostara of the early Germanic peoples. — The Christian Easter a theological misinterpretation. — The Mysteria of the ancient Greeks. — Four seasons of initiation. Significance of each. — Date of the Christian Easter. — Hints concerning lunar influences. — Initiations still possible. — Circulations of the universe. — Meaning of the Easter egg. — Japanese expression of an eternal verity. — Crucifixion and resurrection explained. — To give in order to get: a universal law. — The boundless vision of the gods.
Easter is a beautiful season of the year. It is not merely a day, it is rather a spiritual idea; indeed, it is an ideal — as it were a breath of the soul of antiquity, which has come down to us, albeit distorted, from far past ages, this soul-breathing of antiquity arising in the inner spiritual life of man. By these words I mean that Easter represents an actual event which occurs annually in the spiritual life of man, because the events of man's spiritual life faithfully reflect the events that take place in the spiritual life of the world.
It is a fact, Brothers, that every great mystical event of the ancient religions and philosophies of the world was commemorated in a feast, in the ancient sense of this word — in a festival such as Easter in Occidental lands now is, and such as was the European original and forerunner of the present-day Easter festival: the Ostara or Eastre, as it was called by different families of the early Germanic inhabitants of the northern European countries. In those lands it took the form of a celebration of the vital forces working in the springtime, when new life is surging through the earth and affecting all earth's children, when the trees begin to burgeon and the flowers begin to blow, and when a new hope is singing in men's hearts, representing in men, because derived from the spiritual realms, exactly what appears in the beauteous flowers that in those northern lands Nature then begins to bring forth.
The Easter Festival in Occidental countries is commonly supposed to be a purely Christian one, commemorating what the Christians call the supreme event of their religious faith — the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Are we to accept as wholly complete a merely theological and one-sided interpretation of a really beauteous and significant event of general importance in the history of the spiritual life of mankind? Yet even this theological misinterpretation has a background of verity, a vein of truth running through it, because, as I told you before, every one of the great feast days of every one of the great religious faiths or philosophical faiths of mankind — which means all over the earth — has behind it as its background and origin an esoteric fact, arising in and out of what the ancient Greeks called their Mysteria, "the Mysteries."
Easter is one such; Christmas, the supposed anniversary of the birthday of Jesus, is one such; but two others the Christians never commemorate in celebration, if indeed they ever understood these two latter; and these other two are the great spiritual — psycho-spiritual — events that occur in midsummer or the summer solstice, and at the time of the autumnal equinox. The ancients in their wondrous doctrines of the Mysteries taught that there were four main seasons of the year at which the highest, noblest, most heart-enticing initiations possible to man took place at certain periodically recurring times. These four seasons are respectively the two equinoxes, of spring and of autumn, and the two solstices, of winter and of summer.
The Christians still commemorate two of these seasons — one is solstitial and the other equinoctial — Christmas at the winter solstice more or less, and Easter around the time of the spring equinox: one of these two festivals commemorating the birth, as they say, of their Savior Jesus, and the other commemorating what they call his resurrection. Now even these two words, "birth" and "resurrection", distorted as they are by the orthodox Christian interpretations, and misunderstood as these two words have been from a very early period in Christian ecclesiastical history, nevertheless contain elements of real truth. This is because both of these festivals are distorted representations of two esoteric facts concerning what takes place in the initiation chambers at a winter solstice and at a spring equinox.
The initiatory cycle, my Brothers, contained the circling year as a symbol of the entire spiritual, intellectual, and psychical life cycle of a human being; and at the four cross periods, composing 'the cross of the universe,' as the divine philosopher Plato, the Greek, called it, there took place the four great initiation ceremonies of human existence, representing — what? This first: the "birth" of the new man, of the initiate out of the personal man, the latter living, as Pythagoras put it, a living death, because living merely in the body and in the brain-mind, and usually entirely oblivious of the titanic spiritual forces that make a man really Man.
When the man was thus born, mystically speaking, i. e., when the inner man or initiate arose out of the dead person, he was mystically said to be 'born' when this occurred at the time of the winter solstice, which the Christians celebrate as their Christmas Festival. He then entered upon the first stage of his career as an initiate, one who had begun really to know and really to follow the path, that mystic, small, old path which, when faithfully followed, will lead you to the very heart of the universe; for indeed that pathway is your own spiritual being, the inner man of you, the source of all that is great and sublime in mankind — that inner holy spiritual Thing — our spiritual self by which we are linked intimately with the very gods; and it is thus that following this pathway of the spiritual self we enter into cognizance of and become acquainted with the realms and forces of the spiritual universe, which is the cause and the mother of our exterior, physical universe, just precisely as the spiritual man is the cause and the parent of the psycho-physical man.
How many times have I not told you from this platform that every human being is an inseparable part of the universe — not merely of the physical universe, but more especially of the inner and invisible, the spiritual universe! He is bone of its bone, life of its life, blood of its blood, essence of its essence. There is his real home in the spiritual worlds; and from within him, from the inner and invisible man, spring forth all the qualities that make men great — courage, steadfastness, truth, troth, insight, vision, intellect, spirituality, hope, peace, impersonal love — all are from within. It is to rend the barriers of the physical being, the veils that enshroud the spiritual sun within and which lock these noble, these sublime, things in, that the neophytes followed the pathway of initiation, in order to bring out, in other words to evolve, what was locked up — the inner essence of the man.
The first of these initiations, as I have already told you, which was called the birth, took place and takes place at the time of the winter solstice, December 21-22, which Christians now call the Christmas Festival of December 25; and when this new 'Birth' occurred, then men said: "Lo! the Christ in man is born"; or, "the inner Buddha is born from within the shell of the neophyte." As the man lived on, if he had the strength of will and the courage to proceed and to follow the path to the second initiatory stage — no matter how many years this may have taken or now may take — then came the "Easter" of his life, the second great initiation, when the Christ within him was — not born, because that had already taken place — but when the Christ "arose" and took his own stand as a fully developed master, teacher, guide, and leader, of men.
Then came the third stage, that which was commemorated mythologically by so many of the ancient peoples in the festival of the midsummer, of the summer solstice. On June 21-22 began the "trials" of this third stage, and they lasted for fourteen days, beginning at a time when the moon was new and culminating and ending for that period when the moon was full. So was it also at the winter solstice or Christmas Initiation beginning on December 21-22, when the moon was new and ending fourteen days afterwards, when the moon was full. So was it also during the springtime, the spring equinox, the second stage; and so was it again during the autumn period, September 21-22: each of these initiation ceremonies began when, according to the ancient, wonderful, mystical, true astrology, the sun and moon and planets were rightly situated.
Every one of these initiation periods began either at the time of the winter solstice, or of the spring equinox, or of the summer solstice, or of the autumnal equinox; respectively therefore on December 21-22, and lasting for fourteen days until the full moon; or on March 21-22, and lasting for fourteen days until full moon; and then on June 21-22, and lasting for fourteen days until full moon; and then finally on September 21-22, and lasting for fourteen days until the moon was full.
This whole matter has been so completely lost sight of by Occidental peoples that it is most difficult adequately to describe the true circumstances; and the difficulty is rendered still greater by the fact that due to misunderstanding and ignorance and ecclesiastical bigotry and jealousy, what remained or was taken over by the early Christians has been greatly distorted and changed; so that while actually, as I have before said, the Christians celebrated two of these great initiation festivals, the ones they call Christmas and Easter, they know nothing of the other two; and even the two that they still commemorate they commemorate on approximately the accurate dates but actually inaccurately because not following the exact astronomical time periods.
The circle of the year, as I have told you, represented symbolically the entire initiatory cycle that a man could follow from the beginning of his training until its end. There was the Birth, then the Resurrection, or rather the evocation of the inner Christ or Master, which was the mystic Youth just as the former had been the mystic 'Birth,' then the third which was the mystic Majority or Adulthood, at which the glorious initiate or Master of Life began an active, indeed a strenuous, career among men as Teacher and Guide and Savior; and then finally the last period, that of the passage into the great peace, where, if such was the choice made and followed, the Master left the world of men for ages and entered into other spheres. Many renounced this fourth and supreme initiation in order to remain Buddha-like, in their love and pity for erring mankind, with men in order to help them and to protect them and to guide them.
Please understand that I am not describing these facts as the results of merely my own studies; I am simply repeating what you may prove for yourselves by your own studies actually to exist.
How is the date of Easter reckoned today, according to the Christian fashion of doing so? It is figured in this way: Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon on the date of or first after the spring equinox. Bitter disputes arose in the early days of Christianity about the proper date on which to celebrate the Christian Easter Festival, commemorating the supposed resurrection, the rising, of their Savior; and the greatest and most bitterly debated of these disputes was called the Quartodeciman — the word quartodeciman being taken from the Latin word for fourteenth — "fourteenthers." It was so called because a large body of the early Christians contended that Easter should fall on the fourteenth day — which was full moon day — of the Jewish month of Aviv or Nisan — the same day on which the ancient Jews commemorated their Passover.
The Jewish calendar was wholly a lunar one — their months went by moons. As a matter of fact, even in English the word month, derived from the Anglo-Saxon Monath, means the period of one lunation or one moon, in Anglo-Saxon Mona. But the Christians, the majority of them, didn't like the idea of celebrating the Resurrection of their Savior, Jesus Christ, although he was a Jew, on the same date on which the Jews commemorated their Passover. They were very largely of opinion that their Easter Festival commemorating the alleged Rising of Jesus must be celebrated on a Sunday, the day of the sun. Thus it came about that after a great deal of verbal fighting and verbal squabbling — very bitter and unkind some of it — the arguments of the Quartodecimans were rejected and the Quartodecimans were declared to hold "heretical opinions." This event took place at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 of the Christian Era.
This decree of the Nicaean Council of 325 showed that the Christians of that time had already lost the root-meaning of the Easter Festival; and I may add here that the Jews had the right idea in celebrating their Passover on the fourteenth of the month Nisan, in other words when the moon was full, no matter how much the Jews themselves at that late date may have misunderstood the real meaning and significance of this Spring Festival.
The esoteric fact connected with this Spring Festival is one which is fully explained in our own Theosophical esoteric teachings. But I may remind you that the moon, among all the ancient peoples, and even today among non-Christian peoples practically all over the earth, has been called the Lord and Giver of life as well as of death; and there are certain phases of the moon, in other words certain positions that the moon occupies, taken in connection with the astronomical positions of the sun and the earth, when influences and forces both from the moon to earth and from earth to the moon run strong.
If you will examine the ancient literatures of the world, you will find that all that I have told you thus far is contained in those literatures, albeit in some cases rather carefully hid, as well as many other hints about the same secret facts of nature; and if you want to know how to understand and to construe these hints, then my advice to you is to study theosophy. This study will give you the key of the enigma.
I will add also the following: that the old initiations have not died off from the face of the earth. They take place even today, and in the archaic way, under the supervision and guidance of men, great sages and seers, who know perfectly well what they are doing, and who know what the inner and to us — to the average man — mysterious secrets of the universe are; they know how nature's forces and currents run, and in what direction they run and along what pathways they return; they know, in other words, the circulations of the universe, circulations not only physical but psychical and spiritual; for verily there are such circulations in the universe.
Everything in the universe is connected and bound together with every other thing that exists. Nature is one universal organism or organic entity. There is a harmony which prevails everywhere; and consequently there is a cosmic life, call it a cosmic spirit if you like, which is the ocean of being in which all differentiations take place: which is the great fountain of being in which all things exist, live, and move, and have their being. Consequently nature is one, and, as the old Hermetists said, what you see operative in any part of nature merely mirrors what takes place everywhere, because nature's laws form one unity, and consequently work together everywhere throughout the mighty mass. Out of the small, discover the great; in the great, seek the mystery of the small; as above, so is it below; as below, as the great Egyptian Hermes said, so is it above. Nature is organically one: one life, one essence, one consciousness, and one vast and incomprehensibly differentiated aggregate of bodies — and therefore all things in the mighty whole are ruled and controlled alike and show it forth in the manifestations of their individual existences.
Thus, therefore, following this analogical principle: just as a man's body has its circulations, has its feeble consciousness reflected from the inner spiritual man, so has the mighty organic sphere of our own home-universe. Man is a child of that universe and a reflection of it, manifesting in the small what exists in his great parent.
The northern European peoples had a habit of celebrating the Easter Festival of spring by sending eggs, colored or otherwise, as gifts to each other. Why? We may well ask, what on earth have eggs, colored or otherwise, to do with the festival commemorating the supposed resurrection of the Christian Savior Jesus Christ? What have eggs to do with that event of such momentous importance to the orthodox Christian? It was a pagan custom among European peoples long before the Christians adopted it. The celebration of Easter in the European countries, i. e., in northern European countries, was a pagan custom long before the Christians took it over.
Now harken to the following: out of the apparently inanimate and senseless egg comes a living being. Omne vivum ex ovo, "Every living thing springs from an egg," be it small or be it great. The egg, therefore, was a symbol of the resurrection of life, this mystic, symbolic idea centering around the germ of life enclosed within a relatively senseless encasement or body, which is the egg; but that germ within the egg is a living and working entity; growing — wonderfully, mysteriously, marvelously — in time assuming the form and the content of the individual to be born from the egg; and one day the egg bursts and the entity comes forth — the fledgling, the chick, the human being, for the human life-germ is a cell, which is an egg also.
Sending an egg was therefore a symbolic message, and was meant to say the following: "Brother, with this gift of the symbolic egg, symbol of the new life to be, I hope that you too will soon break the infolding "egg" of the lower self, the personal man; and that, having broken the shell of your personal being, you may step forth as the Master within." It therefore meant: seek initiation; break the shell of the lower personal man and step out as the living germ to be developed into an entity fit to live in the larger world of the spiritual. The egg, therefore, mystically and symbolically, represented the birth of the living Christ — his resurrection from out the tomb of the material encasement. You see immediately that the egg is a beautiful symbol, very suggestive, and giving food for many hours of quiet thought.
You Occidental men don't know what you have within you. As I have told you so often, there is a divinity, there is a god, a divine essence, locked up within each one of you, and you won't let it out. It is particularly difficult for Occidentals — Europeans and Americans — to understand this noble truth and to follow it, because physical life in these countries is pursued so feverishly, with such a fevered enthusiasm, that Occidental men and women have lost the sense of and the feel of the great peace; they have lost self-conscious communion with the inner spirit of themselves.
The personal man, my Brothers, must be "crucified," i. e., "slain" — metaphorically speaking — in order that the Christ within you may resurrect or arise. These are not merely pretty words, poetic tropes, quaint figures of speech: I tell you that within each one of you is a Buddha, or as some of the mystical Christians of today phrase it, within every human being there is the immanent Christos — an actual fact. Why not ally yourself with your own inner divinity, with the divinity within you, the real spiritual and intellectual essence of yourself? There, verily, is the source of wisdom; there is the source of all knowledge. In becoming at one with this inner source you attain the great peace, you reach the great quiet, and mighty strength; you touch the vast reservoir where are stored up all the greatest forces of the universe; for the very heart of each one of you, is in actual fact the heart of the universe — a heart which is not localized, which has no place, which is everywhere, but called the heart of the universe because it is the central focus of consciousness of every thing and every entity that exist anywhere.
Pity the man or the woman who cannot understand even a little of this; for if he cannot understand it he is dead — or sleeping. He is indeed living in the body as the beast lives, but nevertheless is a whitened sepulcher within, as Jesus the Christian sage put it, full of dead men's bones, and of rottenness and corruption.
The pathway of beauty, the pathway of peace and strength, the pathway of the great quiet, is within you — not within the material body, but within the inmost focus of your consciousness. This is the pathway that the great sages and seers of all the ages have taught. Follow that pathway; it will lead you to the heart of the sun, the master and guide of our solar system; and later if you follow it, it will conduct you to a destiny still more sublime. Yet that sublime destiny is only the beginning, only the beginning of something grander; for evolution, growth, expansion of consciousness, go on forever.
In different countries there are different ways of phrasing these things of inner beauty. I listened two nights ago to a speech by a Japanese lecturer, a thoughtful man, a man of kindly heart, one who had already seen somewhat of the vision beautiful and who, during the course of his lecture, illustrated one point of his address by an example — a Japanese poem. I will repeat this poem as I heard it; and in this connection please remember that the essence of poetry is visioning. Poetry is not merely the collocation of words; it is not rhyming. The noblest poetry oft is that which has no rhyme, but which instead appeals powerfully to the intellect and to the heart, because it gives vision; and this Japanese poem consisted of three lines only, nine words:
An old pond —
A frog plunging —
A great splash.
Do not these words give to you a beautiful and suggestive picture? The beauty of this little poem lies in the fact that there is in it no meretricious ornament, no wordy decoration; and because of this fact a thought, a picture, vivid, graphic, real, is presented to the minds of the hearers, and then the magic of thought is woven by the minds of the hearers themselves; and each man interprets the beauty of this thought strictly according to his own development of the understanding and of the poetic sense — which means the sense of beauty and consciousness.
"Now, what is this 'old pond'?" asked the lecturer. It is the spiritual life, he replied, the life beautiful, the inner life, the great peace, called old, because it has existed from eternity. It is the essence of the spiritual world; and it is called pond after the same fashion that made other mystical thinkers of other ancient peoples speak of the waters of space. And "a frog plunging": how graphic in its simplicity is this! It seems a desecration to color this thing by trying to explain it: the frog plunging into the water where he feels at home is the man yearning to return into his own — to re-enter the spiritual existence where his soul is native. Is not this the very heart of the idea imbodied in the Easter Festival? Is it not man rising out of the material and plunging into the spiritual life of his soul? There indeed are the Resurrection and the Life!
The spiritually thoughtful man, the man yearning for truth, the man yearning to be truly himself, his greater self, his inner self, his real self, to be the god within him — yearning to be and to grow and to enter into the light and the great peace, such a man may have his own individual Easter at any time. His Easter comes to him: his resurrection into the spiritual life comes to him: when he breaks the shell of the personal man with all its weaknesses and cloying desires and enshrouding veils, and casts that shell aside. Not by killing the body — that is not the essential idea — but by becoming at one with the god within, so that the body is no longer a hindrance but a faithful tool with which to carry out in this our sphere of existence, the mandates of the inner god.
And the Crucifixion? I use this word because we Occidentals live in a country which has been Christian — I am speaking to people who probably have been brought up as Christians; but if I were speaking in the Orient I would use the metaphors and the figures of speech of Oriental countries, as, for instance, those of Buddhism or of Brahmanism, or of the teachings of the Tao. The meaning of the crucifixion is the resignation, painful to most human beings, of the material personal man and exchanging it for a greater light; and it is called a crucifixion because to the personal man with his limited vision it seems like his own death. We must remember that the inner Christ — or the inner Buddha if you please — is fixed to the cross of material existence; but after the crucifixion there ensues the resurrection of the inner god.
Yes, there are four great initiatory periods which take place during the course of the cycling year at the times of the two solstices and the two equinoxes; and these four initiations take place even today. I will tell you frankly, my Brothers, that the Theosophical Society has, among its other objects, to restore to men self-consciousness of the knowledge that they can grow, advance, evolve forth, and bring forth what is within them; and that this can be done and that they can do it most rapidly by passing through the initiatory rites, preceded and followed by the requisite and rigid training and teaching. I can show you where lies this path of initiation, but you yourselves must walk that path. I cannot walk it for you. I cannot grow for you. But as a theosophical teacher I can show you how to help yourselves, how to find yourselves this pathway of initiation — this pathway leading, as I have so often said before, towards that Mystic East, which is not any geographical locality on earth, but is the place where the glorious sun of spirit is seen in the far distance by the soul of man.
Crucifixion, to adopt the Christian phraseology, each one of you must undergo some time in the sense that I have just briefly outlined; you cannot enter heaven, again to follow the Christian phrasing, with the bags and impedimenta that you lug around with you in this material sphere, for there is no place for them in the spiritual world. You must go stripped like the athlete, leaping forward in glad anticipation of attaining what he sees on the distant horizon. In other words, you cannot follow the path successfully, nor successfully pass the portals of the temple of wisdom, until you have found your inner self at least in some degree and until you yearn for more of the beauteous vision. This beauteous vision is not outside of you. Your spiritual life is within you. This beauteous vision is the vision of the god within you, clad in the habiliments of the sun. This is not poetry, although it is true that I am now using the language of the outer court. You must become clothed, at least a little, with the solar splendor, you must have become at least a little at one with the buddhic glory before you can reach the sun and pass its portals — go into its heart. In other words, you must become like unto it.
You cannot become one with your own inner god until the personal man, who is the becomer, has become at least to a certain extent godlike. You cannot enter into the great peace until you yourself have become peaceful. Oh! Resurrect the god within you, the inner Christ, the inner Buddha, the inner Brahma, call it by what name you will; that solar splendor which is the very core of your being. Be like the frog of the Japanese poet, plunging into the old pond — the ancient pond of your spiritual consciousness. Then you will attain truth, light, peace, love, pity, compassion, strength, discrimination, vision, glory unspeakable: and you can have all these at any time when you choose to have them. It is a matter of choosing — simply a matter of choosing, and doing.
My father was a Christian clergyman, and I remember that when I was a boy I used to go to church. In fact, I had to go to church. I used to sit in the pew, unless indeed I sat in a chorister's seat, because I had to sing, too. I used to sit in one of the pews and look around and study the faces of the people; and I wondered what was the matter with everybody. They indeed seemed to be kindly, courteous people, sitting there "on the job" — a sort of duty which some of them seemed to like and some of them didn't seem to like; and I had an instinct that something was either wrong with me or wrong with the system. I have now found out where the wrong lies — and I am not going to tell you what I have discovered. I don't think that I need to tell you. I am sure that you feel exactly as I do.
Then, when I grew older and began to read a little of certain Oriental literature that fell to my hand, I realized that the instinct of my soul had been a true one; and after that, as I sat in the pew in church and looked around, I saw something which seemed to me new in the faces of my fellows. Oh, the spiritual hunger, the yearning, the unsatisfied yearning for light, that met my eyes! They were doing something more than merely being on the job. They wanted truth. They wanted consolation. They wanted vision — and found it not.
Then, still a little later, Theosophical literature fell to my hand and I read it avidly and studied it eagerly, and then my heart awoke, as my brain had awaked before. But now, from a study of the theosophical literature, my heart awaking, I began to realize what there was, not only in me, but in my fellows; and I said to myself: hereafter my life is consecrate to what I know to be the truth. No man can live unto himself alone; no man can tread the pathway — the still, small, old pathway — of the spiritual self within him, alone. Marvelous thing that this is: you can gain only when you give, you can truly understand only when you interpret for others; you can truly be only when you have renounced.
These sound like the paradoxes of Lao-tse, the great Chinese philosopher; and so they are. They are true. But in the Occident did not Jesus called the Christ, of whom Christians today are celebrating the anniversary of the supposed resurrection — do they not also say that their Jesus taught: "Give up thy life if thou wouldst" — what? — "find it"? Lao-tse never uttered a more paradoxical saying than that; and it is a very true one. Why is it so? Because growth is expansion; growth is enlargement, whether of body, or of faculty, or of consciousness; and you cannot grow to the greater until you have given up the love of the smaller. You can bring the best in you out only when you give; and this therefore is the pathway of training that I am now laying before you — a pathway leading to the resurrection of the Christos within you — to the bringing out of the inner god. If you wish to get, give; and the greatest getting is the god within you; and you get it by giving yourself. Paradoxical? Yes. But I don't believe it is so paradoxical that you cannot understand it.
The same principle prevails — to come down to earthly things — even in your ordinary business world. You cannot get business until you give of your substance to get it; you have to give something before you can get something; and this materialistic principle is merely a reflection of a universal law of nature; you cannot find your spiritual self until you give it; and you cannot find it until you give up the lower man, yourself.
Who are you, anyway? Are you the god within you, or the lower man? You are indeed both: yet the lower man is merely a reflection of the higher man, much as the sun is reflected in a mirror, or in a basin of water, or as the moon's cold silvery beams are reflected at night in the waters of the pond. Thus the sunny god within you reflects its own divine brilliance through the brain-mind of you; and this brain-mind of you is the personal man. So, therefore, as you see, merely giving up the personal man is actually becoming at one with the great man, the great one within, your inner god.
You are, now, human Easter eggs! But I think that in your minds — which I see by the expression on your kindly faces have been receptive and have understood — I have placed the germ of a noble thought: I think that by our short study together this afternoon I have enabled the life-germ within your soul to stir in its ages-long sleep a little, to awaken a little more; and, to change the figure of speech, I feel that I have put seeds of thought into your minds today which will grow and in the future produce fruit one hundredfold; and I pray the immortal gods that they may germinate nobly and grow great in your consciousness — and bring forth your inner self.
May the time soon come for you when the great peace, the boundless vision, will be yours. There is no reward like unto these two. With heart at peace, with mind at rest, with both these growing rapidly and expanding, cannot you sense already the destiny that lies before you in the distant aeons of the future? The great peace is the great life; and the vision sublime, which your spirits will see, is the vision that the gods have.