In dying for their country, those souls in the hell of battle are giving birth to the new time. In suffering with them, your souls are giving birth to the new in yourselves. Do not look for joy while humanity is in travail, unless you can find the joy in suffering. Yes, I know the time when first, and through whom, that grand idea found lodgment in your consciousness. It is the secret of great souls in this hour of the world’s pain. If you suffer till you can suffer no more--then the poles shift, and the _joy_ of suffering illuminates the soul. Then the beautiful being in yourself hovers over the battlefield where the lesser self has been slain. There is a beautiful being in every one of you, the bird that sings in the heart of the earthquake, the rose that nestles in the hot mouth of the cannon, the pearl that cannot be crushed by the landslide, the angel that illumines hell. All the normal feelings of the human heart are intensified at this time. No one is the same as before the war burst--no one, anywhere in the world. The soul of humanity is in travail. This incarnation of humanity is turned against itself, and rends itself. The heart of humanity is an abyss, into which humanity had grown too blind to look, so the blazing torches of the guardians of good and evil have been thrust into the abyss, and all the drowsing dwellers therein have been suddenly, rudely awakened. Oh, hearts of earth, do not fall asleep again! Pity and love one another, for the pain of one is the pain of each, and over the battlefield of the suffering race the Beautiful Being hovers. Humanity is the One, and humanity is the many, and all together you may come into the inheritance of your Father which is in heaven. You are familiar with the symbol of the Rose-Cross. Not until the hard wood is driven through your four limbs, in the pain of your shocked and wounded nerves, can the great red rose of love unfold its perfumed petals upon your breast, between the arms of the cross. The human in you is the pain of the cross, the divine in you is the perfume of the rose, and you yourself, you human _and_ divine, are the Rose-Cross. If you shrink from the splintering pain of the wood as it claims you for its own, you cannot smell the perfume of the rose which also claims you for its own. Do not refuse the great initiation, O humanity of the races! Do not hide yourself in the dungeon of fear when the great Initiator comes! On the awful cross of war shall blossom the red rose of the new race. On the cross of each mortal form _may_ blossom _its_ red rose. The rose marks the balance between the East and the West, between the rising and the setting sun, between the human and the divine. The arms of the cross extend to infinity, its feet are buried in the substance of eternity, its head is among the angels and the gods, and the heart of the rose is everywhere. It is in every heart of all these myriads who shrink at the touch of the hard wood.