Those Yoga aphorisms of a long-dead Hindu sage, set between a golden September evening and a guttering candle, marked probably the opening of my mind.... The entire paraphernalia of my evangelical teaching thenceforth began to withdraw. Though my father’s beliefs had cut deep enough to influence me for many years to come, their dread, with the terror of a personal Satan and an actual Hell, grew less from that moment. The reality of the dogmas was impaired. Here was another outlook upon life, another explanation of the world; caprice was eliminated and justice entered; the present was the result of the past, the future determined by the present; I must reap what I had sown, but, also, I could sow what I wished to reap. Hope was born. Apart from this was that curious deep sense of familiarity with these Eastern teachings, as with something I understood and in which I felt at home.... Cautiously, I put indirect questions to my father, who at once--the clumsy questions betraying me--detected Satan’s subtle handiwork. He was grave and troubled. With affectionate solicitude he told me, finally, a story of naïve horror, intended to point the warning. A young man, who suffered from repeated epileptic fits, had tried every doctor and specialist in vain, when, as a last resort, he followed some friend’s counsel of despair, and consulted a medium. The medium, having conferred with his familiar, handed the patient a little locket which he was to wear day and night about his neck, but never on any account to open. The spell that would save him from a repetition of his fits lay inside, but he must resist to the death the curiosity to read it. To the subsequent delight and amazement of everybody, the fits abruptly ceased; the man was cured; until one day, after years of obedience, curiosity overcame him; he opened the brief inscription, and fell down in a fit--dead. The wording, minutely written in red ink, ran as follows: “Let him alone till he drop into Hell!”