To know that Love is universal, supreme, all-sufficing; to be freed from the trammels of evil; to be quit of the inward unrest; to know that all men are striving to realize the Truth each in his own way; to be satisfied, sorrowless, serene; this is peace; this is gladness; this is immortality; this is Divinity; this is the realization of selfless Love.

    I stood upon the shore, and saw the rocks
      Resist the onslaught of the mighty sea,
    And when I thought how all the countless shocks
      They had withstood through an eternity,
    I said, “To wear away this solid main
    The ceaseless efforts of the waves are vain.”

    But when I thought how they the rocks had rent,
      And saw the sand and shingles at my feet
    (Poor passive remnants of resistance spent)
      Tumbled and tossed where they the waters meet,
    Then saw I ancient landmarks ’neath the waves,
    And knew the waters held the stones their slaves.

    I saw the mighty work the waters wrought
      By patient softness and unceasing flow;
    How they the proudest promontory brought
      Unto their feet, and massy hills laid low;
    How the soft drops the adamantine wall
    Conquered at last, and brought it to its fall.

    And then I knew that hard, resisting sin
      Should yield at last to Love’s soft ceaseless roll
    Coming and going, ever flowing in
      Upon the proud rocks of the human soul;
    That all resistance should be spent and past,
    And every heart yield unto it at last.

ENTERING INTO THE INFINITE

From the beginning of time, man, in spite of his bodily appetites and desires, in the midst of all his clinging to earthly and impermanent things, has ever been intuitively conscious of the limited, transient, and illusionary nature of his material existence, and in his sane and silent moments has tried to reach out into a comprehension of the Infinite, and has turned with tearful aspiration toward the restful Reality of the Eternal Heart.

While vainly imagining that the pleasures of earth are real and satisfying, pain and sorrow continually remind him of their unreal and unsatisfying nature.  Ever striving to believe that complete satisfaction is to be found in material things, he is conscious of an inward and persistent revolt against this belief, which revolt is at once a refutation of his essential mortality, and an inherent and imperishable proof that only in the immortal, the eternal, the infinite can he find abiding satisfaction and unbroken peace.

And here is the common ground of faith; here the root and spring of all religion; here the soul of Brotherhood and the heart of Love,—­that man is essentially and spiritually divine and eternal, and that, immersed in mortality and troubled with unrest, he is ever striving to enter into a consciousness of his real nature.