If you are at all cast down, or if any of us is, then by just that much are our thoughts lessened in power. One could be confined in a prison and yet be a worker for the Cause. So I pray you to remove from your mind any distaste for present circumstances. If you can succeed in looking at it all as _just what you in fact desired_, then it will act not only as a strengthener of your good thoughts, but will reflexly act on your body and make it stronger. All this reminds me of H., of whose failure you now know. And in this be not disappointed. It could hardly be otherwise. Unwisely he made his demands upon the Law before being quite ready. That is, unwisely in certain senses, for in the greater view naught can be unwise. His apparent defeat, at the very beginning of the battle, is for him quite of course. He went where the fire is hottest and made it hotter by his aspirations. All others have and all will suffer the same. For it makes no difference that his is a bodily affection; as all these things proceed from mental disturbances, we can easily see the same cause under a physical ailment as under a mental divagation. Strangely, too, I wrote you of the few who really do stay, and soon after this news came and threw a light--a red one, so to say--upon the information of H's retreat. See how thought interlinks with thought on all planes when the True is the aim. We ourselves are not wholly exempt, inasmuch as we daily and hourly feel the strain. Accept the words of a fellow traveller; these: Keep up the aspiration and the search, but do not maintain the attitude of despair or the slightest repining. Not that you do. I cannot find the right words; but surely you would know all, were it not that some defects hold you back. The darkness and the desolation are sure to be ours, but it is only illusionary. Is not the Self pure, bright, bodiless, and free,--and art thou not that? The daily waking life is but a penance and the trial of the body, so that _it_ too may thereby acquire the right condition. In dreams we see the truth and taste the joys of heaven. In waking life it is ours to gradually distill that dew into our normal consciousness.