Do you remember telling me how, when a child, you used to see the forms of American Indians on the hills and in the valleys of your native State? They were those who many years before had walked those hills and valleys in the sunlight, and who were still held in the tenuous matter above that region. The eyes of childhood are sometimes very clear. Above those battlefields of Europe the sensitive eye may see for many years the forms of those who will not be able to make their escape. And I do not mean akashic records. War is hell, and the hell does not end with the signing of peace papers. That is one reason why we want you, and those others who believe in brotherhood, to carry that spirit of brotherhood among the nations that have been at war. You have no conception of the power of a quiet faith in a great and true idea. The man who really loves his fellows has a wider influence than his own immediate circle of friends. The atmosphere around him is permeated with that brotherly love, and sensitive souls can feel it. Some day sail up the Rhine with that sentiment in your heart. _April 12._ LETTER XXI A SOUL IN PURGATORY DARE I talk to you of the purgatory to which the rage of battle conducts so many souls that only a little while before walked the earth as men, and went their daily round from house to office, loving their wives and children and exchanging worldly commonplaces in the intervals of work, all unmindful that they were hourly drifting toward the Great Event? Yes, I dare. We will follow one soul that I myself followed. His story I can reconstruct from memory, for every act of it is stamped upon my mind. No, I do not need brain-cells to remember with. Neither will you--when you have escaped the prison of your brain-cells. The man was an officer in an English regiment and he was a bachelor. Outwardly he was much like other men, but his consciousness was different. He lived in a world of his own, for he was a reader and a thinker. He was not a very good man. Not _all_ Englishmen are good even now when England is at war, you who bristle at any criticism of your beloved maternal island--you who write for me! This man was not very good because there was so little love in his heart. He was not incapable of love, yet he was unable to awaken love in others, and so was soul-starved. But sometimes he was conscious of a great yearning, and when the yearning came he was impatient, and took a drink, or cursed his servant, or both. Sometimes when he was most impatient with the world and with himself, he went on a “spree.” The war began. His natural impatience found something congenial in the hurry and noise of the expedition. He was glad to go.