It comes to us so often that we make our own heavens. So many forget that we require beauty as well as goodness and truth. Not sages alone, not saints alone--but artists, workmen and players in beauty, as well as in love and wisdom. The Master will come to you in your own thought-form; your heaven will fill your own conception. Saints of the elder bigotries will have angels with feathers and peasant feet. Those who have clung so hard to their bodies, must galvanise them again with rheumatism and senility and mortgage-ridden minds. I tell them here to be careful what they dream--to take all the loves, the safe things, love of child and mother and mate, love of comrades, the passion for dying for another ... to take Nature's perfect things,--the grains, the fruits, bees, stars, devas, poems--majesty of mountain, strength of the field, holy breath of sea--the highest moments of song and thought and meetings ... to take all that is consummate for the thought-form--to build the coming of the Master in that--light from the Unseen--to build for eternity.... The Master can only show you that much of Himself as your own highest picture contains.... This is the practice of his presence, so liberating to the minds of dreamers and workmen and mothers. * * * * * Steve has done some thinking on the quest of beauty in relation to the young lovers of the New Race. The rest of the chapter is his writing: Beauty is the lustre shining from within, because of the sheer intensity of being. It is proof of spiritual battles won, a gift earned by ages of renunciation, martyrdom, and self-sacrifice. It is manifest balance, order and serenity gained from isolation and self-conquest. The glow seen about the heads of saints is really there. It is a splendour not of earth, the same ray from which beauty is drawn. A certain tragic joy and a terrible serenity, that is mistaken for melancholy, often goes with beauty. It is the result of turning back voluntarily for work in the world, renouncing possible bliss for the service of humanity. Chief among the spiritual victories mentioned, is this turning back, facing the stream of evolution again, and all its cold metal, for new work. So its light is a light from behind--a reflection to the world of the wonders ahead. Beauty is an indication of the weave of one's higher life, of developed discrimination, material proof of the perfecting ordination of the life, will and emotions. All that is beautiful is good, all that is good must be beautiful. Ugliness is false and fleeting, a confession of sickness and turmoil within. There can absolutely be no great love without a sheer worship of beauty, not for itself, not from the æsthetic standpoint--no temperamental moth-man ethics--but the calm mastery of its inner meaning, which is mastery of life itself.