Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause. He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws. All other life is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell; A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling of the camel-bell. V. ANALYSIS OF THE RELIGION OF LOVE Put away the tale of love that travellers tell; Do thou serve God with all thy might. JALÁLU'D-DÍN RÚMÍ. Súfíism, then, is the religion of Love. Lafcadio Hearn tells us, in his inimitable way, that earthly love is brought about by the memories of innumerable loves in the past, a host of the phantoms of you seeking in your momentary ego the joy of Love over again. Schopenhauer, with much pride, quotes Rochefoucauld as having said that "love may be compared to a ghost since it is something we talk about but have never seen." Precisely; but this is no antagonistic statement, as Schopenhauer supposed. Rather than belittling the beauty of Love, it is an unconscious defence of a very great truth. Love can only be compared with Love. There is nothing else to compare it with. No one has seen Love, because no one has seen God. A little child plays at funerals and tenderly buries a dead butterfly, not because it understands the mystery of Death, but because Love prompted the action. And so we love without knowing the why and the wherefore. Scientists have already proved that first love is not controlled by either of the individuals loving; that it is but the expression of thousands of tendencies in past lives. That Love can be ever personal, ever limited to the individual, is unthinkable. We must recognise some day that those countless tendencies, those strivings after men and women seeming to hold our souls' affinities, were but the momentary finding of God in His creatures. We do not love a woman merely because she is pretty, possesses a pleasing mannerism. We love her because, in an indescribable way, she sings a song we alone can fully understand, a voice that lifts up our soul and makes it strong. We follow that Invisible Figure from land to land, from heart to heart, from Death into Life, on and on. When Love loves Love for its own sake, when the self is dead, we shall meet Him. We shall find the Beloved to be the Perfection, the realisation of that strong desire that made us lose ourselves in others. The more we lose ourselves in God the more we find Him. Men and women love and die. But Love is a Divine Essence working through and through innumerable lives for its own eternal glory. Personality is limited only to the finite world--perhaps a phase or two beyond the grave. Even that is the sum-total of countless so-called personalities in the past. We love instinctively. If it was wholly physical then it dies with the death of the object. If it was infinitely more than that, if it was the love of Goodness and Purity and the Beautiful it lives on for ever. But these things