tidy ❦ Oho! why, your eyes are filling with tears—how absurd!—and you want to hear more about the Artist and his Wife and the Little Girl! But, bless me! that is all I know about them. ¶ However, I do know that Georg Brandes is one of the Apostles of the Better Day. His message is a plea for beauty—that is to say, harmony. He would have us live lives of simplicity, truth, honesty and gentleness ❦ He would have us work for harmony and love, instead of for place and power. Georg Brandes is an individualist and a symbolist. He thinks all of our belongings should mean much to us, and that great care should be exercised in selection. We need only a few things, but each of these things should suggest utility, strength, harmony and truth. All of our actions must be suggestive of peace and right ❦ Not only must we speak truth, but we must live it. Our lives should be consecrated to the good: lives consecrated to Truth and Beauty. Consecrated Lives! And so this Artist and his Wife I told you of were priests of Beauty, and their Little Girl was a neophyte; and the room where the Roman lamp burned was filled with the holiness of beauty, and no unkind thought or wrong intent could exist there. Consecrated Lives! that is the subject. There is a brotherhood of such, and you can reach out and touch finger-tips with the members the round world over. ¶ Beauty is an Unseen Reality—an attempt to reveal a spiritual condition. Members of this Brotherhood of Consecrated Lives do not take much interest in Political Policies; and all the blatant blowing of brass horns that are used on ’Change, in pulpits, or by Fourth of July speakers are to them trivial and childish. They distinguish at once the note of affectation, hypocrisy and pretense in it all. They know its shallowness, its selfishness and its extremely transient quality. ¶ Yet your man of the Consecrated Life may mix with the world, and do the world’s business, but for him it is not the true world, for hidden away in his heart he keeps burning a lamp before a shrine dedicated to Love and Beauty ❦ The Adept only converses at his best with an Adept, and he does this through self-protection. To hear the world’s coarse laugh in his Holy of Holies—no! and so around him is a sacred circle, and within it only the Elect are allowed to enter. To join this brotherhood of Consecrated Lives requires no particular rites of initiation—no ceremonial—no recommendations ❦ You belong when you are worthy. But do not for a moment imagine you have solved the difficulty when you have once entered. To pride yourself on your entrance is to run the danger of finding yourself outside the pale with password hopelessly forgotten. Within the esoteric lines are circles and inner circles, and no man yet has entered the inmost circle where the Ark of the Covenant is secreted. All is relative. ¶ But you know you belong to the Brotherhood when you feel the absolute nothingness of this world of society, churches,