56 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying 

 fire of Time. 



United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, 

 the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new 

 vision is with him always, shedding over every daily 

 task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march 

 through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured 

 by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope 

 to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, 

 as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, 

 seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very 

 brief is the time in which we can help them, in which 

 their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed 

 sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the 

 balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never- 

 tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil 

 faith in hours of despair/ Let us not weigh in grudging 

 scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of 

 their need of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the 

 blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives ; let us 

 remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same 

 darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. 

 And so, when their day is over, when their good and 

 their evil have become eternal by the immortality of the 

 past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where 

 they failed, no deed of ours was the cause ; but wherever 

 a spark of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were 

 ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave 

 words in which high courage glowed. 



Brief and powerless is Man's life ; on him and all his 

 race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind 

 to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent 

 matter rolls on its relentless way ; for Man, condemned 

 to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass 



