Many a night, while she walked home after an evening’s talk with her unseen friends, she felt in touch with all the universe. Nothing was far off, not even the stars, which looked down upon earth with tender human sympathy in their bright faces. She feared nothing, and knew no loneliness, feeling herself attended by an innumerable company. Already she believed that what Kant said will yet be proved, “that the human soul, even in this life, is by an indissoluble communion connected with all the immaterial natures of the spirit world, acting upon them, and receiving impressions from them.” Now she understood more clearly the meaning of this statement by our greatest philosopher, Emerson: “every man is an inlet to the Divine mind and to all of that mind.” Yes, and an outlet, also. Now, now she began to see that “the spirit of man is a personal limitation of the supreme spirit,” as another philosopher says; that “God is the all of man’s life, the power of man at bottom being the power of God.” Now she could understand that “what we call the material universe is but the manifestation of infinite Deity to our finite minds”; and that “our individual self is found,” as the ancient wisdom of the East, and likewise Jesus and Paul, affirms, “included in the contents of the Absolute Being or Self.” “Eternal Being mirrors itself in every existence,” she murmured reverently; “Eternal Being, and we are it.” The pulsing, eager, feverish life of the city was stilled. Its people slept, at least they were asleep to the truth, and refused to be awakened. Thousands of Ephraims, joined to their idols, dwelt contentedly in their fools’ paradise, asking to be let alone. And what were those idols? Mists of their own creation, perishable and unreal--for nothing endures, nothing is real but being, Eternal Being. Like the wayward sons and daughters of old Jerusalem, they will not be gathered under the wing of even divine wisdom. The old dreams of childhood came back, with their perplexing reminiscence of life in a land remote in the past, whose people knew not misery. Had she lived before? Yes, always. How could it be otherwise with Eternal Being as the background, the source and centre of her existence? For this there was neither beginning nor end. Was she not an indestructible part of all that is, was and ever shall be? Behind her was no birth; before her no death. These were but “world-fictions.”