Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our view, in rushing round the sun; but perhaps found from another angle to fill quite another part in the cosmic scheme. And on this apparently unimportant speck, wandering among systems of suns, the appearance of life and its slow development and ever-increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain and of pleasure; and presently man with his growing capacity for self-affirmation and self-sacrifice, for rapture and for grief. Love with its unearthly happiness, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain; all the ecstasy, all the anguish that we extract from the rhythm of life and death. It is much, really, for one little planet to bring to birth. And presently another music, which some--not many perhaps yet, in comparison with its population--are able to hear. The music of a more inward life, a sort of fugue in which the eternal and temporal are mingled; and here and there some, already, who respond to it. Those who hear it would not all agree as to the nature of the melody; but all would agree that it is something different in kind from the rhythm of life and death. And in their surrender to this--to which, as they feel sure, the physical order too is really keeping time--they taste a larger life; more universal, more divine. As Plotinus said, they are looking at the Conductor in the midst; and, keeping time with Him, find the fulfilment both of their striving and of their peace. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Von Huegel: "Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion," p. 60.] [Footnote 2: Ennead I, 6. 7.] [Footnote 3: Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV.] [Footnote 4: Op. cit., loc. cit.] [Footnote 5: "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 31.] [Footnote 6: Bernard Bosanquet: "What Religion Is" p. 32.] [Footnote 7: Aug.: Conf. VII, 27.] [Footnote 8: "My vision, becoming more purified, entered deeper and deeper into the ray of that Supernal Light, which in itself is true"--Par. XXXIII, 52.] [Footnote 9: "The Tragic Sense of Life In Men and Peoples," p. 194.] [Footnote 10: T. Upton: "The Bases of Religious Belief," p. 363.] [Footnote 11: Blake: "Jerusalem," Cap. i.] [Footnote 12: Nicholson: "The Divani Shamsi Tabriz," p. 141.] [Footnote 13: Ennead V. i. 3.] [Footnote 14: Kabir, op. cit., p. 41.] [Footnote 15: "Love, whoso loves thee cannot idle be, so sweet to him to taste thee; but every hour he lives in longing that he may love thee more straitly. For in thee the heart so joyful dwells, that he who feels it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy savour"--Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 101.] [Footnote 16: Isaiah xl, 29-31.] [Footnote 17: Aug.: Conf. X, 28.] [Footnote 18: "Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap. 12.] [Footnote 19: "Le Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine," p. ii.] [Footnote 20: "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap. 20.] [Footnote 21: Ruysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Beguines;" Cap. 8.]