A man is not, as you have so often said, so many pounds of flesh and bone and blood and sinew, but a man is a state of consciousness. It is because you recognize their state of consciousness as being themselves, that men and women reveal themselves to you. If--or when--you go back to Europe to live, do not forget your country. Do not remain too long away from it, lest you lose touch with that unique consciousness which shall flower in the Sixth Race. Yes, a great art will grow up in America. After another fifty years it will be ripe. Let us hope it will not begin to rot thereafter, but like a sound American apple preserve its solidity for a long time. This war is good for America. It is not well for a race to have so great a material success without some pain and struggle. It is pain that mellows the heart. America has not yet found her soul, but she will find it. Those Americans who are now broken-hearted are finding their souls. France found her soul a long time ago, and she is now finding her divinity. Would she have found it but for suffering? The Christ upon the cross is greater than the Christ at the marriage supper in Cana of Galilee. If I had not wanted you to write this book, I should have sent you back to London, that you might experience the strain of air raids and insufficient food. I should have sent you back to France, that you might see and touch and minister to the wounded. Though you have endured the strain of the astral world at war, you have not yet seen and touched and tasted the agony of physical suffering that the women of France have seen and touched and tasted. But you cannot live and suffer in too many worlds at once. Do you not think that our American boys who are fighting now in France will be greater for the experience--whether they live or die? Life in material form is not the only life, and those who make the great sacrifice will gain more than they lose. It is sublime to die for an ideal. “To make the world safe for democracy.” America is better known to Europeans now than she has been before. Many of you will go and come, as you have done in the past; and a few of you will vitalize the mutual understanding between America and Europe. But you can do that only by glorifying your own nationality in your hearts. I do not mean flaunting it. Let it burn as an altar fire, in the secret temple of your being. THE END =TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES= Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced. Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.