Happy are those who understand the language of the elements. But where are _they_ going for whom the word element has no other meaning than that given to it by physics or materialistic chemistry? Will it be towards well-known shores that the surge of the great waters will bear them, when they have lost their footing in the deluge which is approaching? Will it be towards the peaks of a new Ararat that they will find themselves carried, towards the heights of light and sunshine, where there is a ledge on which to place the feet in safety, or perchance is it a fathomless abyss that will swallow them up as soon as they try to struggle against the irresistible billows of an unknown element? We must prepare ourselves and study truth under every aspect, endeavoring to ignore nothing, if we do not wish to fall into the abyss of the unknown when the hour shall strike. It is useless to leave it to chance and to await the intellectual and psychic crisis which is preparing, with indifference, if not with crass disbelief, saying that at the worst the flowing tide will drive us all in the course of nature towards the farther shore; for it is far more probable that the tidal wave will cast up nothing but a corpse. The strife will be terrible in any case between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on the one hand, and philosophy and mysticism on the other--mysticism, that veil of more or less translucency which hides the eternal Truth. But it is not materialism that will gain the upper hand. Every fanatic whose ideas isolate him from the universal axiom that "There is no religion higher than Truth" will see himself by that very fact rejected, like an unworthy stone, from the Archway called Universal Brotherhood. Tossed by the waves, driven by the winds, reeling in that element which is so terrible because unknown, he will soon find himself engulfed....