Quite obviously also there will be both good prophets and bad: even a prosaic telegram may be repeated on payment of half the original cost, because of the possibility of error occurring in the text. How much more may error occur, then, when tenuous messages are being sent from high sources by the power of thought, and when the receiving instrument is so often imperfect, so frequently out of gear, and when that instrument in addition is more than a trifle wilful and tainted with selfishness. Inspiration is ever ready, it floats around us like tuned wireless vibrations waiting to be picked up by a sympathetic receiver. Yet so few receivers, being but human after all, are sensitive enough and sufficiently delicate in in their poise to catch the floating news: and so the harvest is plenteous but those who garner it are few. Perhaps Sullivan felt something of this when, in the "Prodigal Son," he penned the simplest and yet most eloquent of melodies to the words, "O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments," ending up with the words, set too simply for any but a consummate artist to sing with complete effect,--"Turn ye, turn ye--why will ye die?" The marvel truly is that we are already so dead, so immured and petrified in our hard self-satisfaction, when we might so easily develop the freedom, fluidity, and delicacy of fine response to these tenuous intimations of our own spirituality and high destiny. Here we live, as some writer has aptly said, on top of a gold mine, and the tragedy is that we are ignorant of the gold. We live, and move, and have our being in an ocean of spiritual and inspiring thought: surely our problem is to find the conditions that will avail to put us in touch with this lively world of inspiration in which we are accustomed to pass so dead and unresponsive an existence. CHAPTER V THE CONDITIONS OF INSPIRATION "The greatest Masterpieces in Music will be found to contain sensuous, emotional, and rational factors, and something beside: some divine element of life by which they are animated and inspired" _W. H. Hadow_ It may be interesting for a little space to consider the conditions under which Inspiration operates, for, like any other faculty, it is subject to the control of law. We have already emphasised the universality of vibration and the call of like to like, but the theme will bear some further elaboration.