All around us in natural things--in the curve of that rose-stem and the passionate flush of its petals--in those white bells there, looking as if blown out of veined foam--in the luscious scents that wind and linger round the garden, He has set, as in a language, the secrets of His being and ours, of our why and wherefore, if we could but read them.
Like the characters and monuments of a bygone age staring from a waste of sand or the front of a precipice, these words and phrases seem to say, not 'There was a king who was mighty, but whose throne is cut down,' but 'There lives a God who would be all tenderness if He could, and is more beautiful in His nature than anything you have ever seen or dreamed of.

Win your way to Him, if you can; do not let Him go till you have His secret.

That is a talisman indeed, that shall shut you in palaces of delight where no torment shall touch you.' "And not a selfish paradise.

We are but as others, we mystics; it is only that we take--or rather are led, for it is no will of ours, but an imperious voice that calls us--the straight and flowery road to God, pressing through but one hedge of thorns, while you and others struggle to Him along the dusty road that winds and wanders.

But our paradise would be no paradise if we did not know that our brothers were coming, coming; the beauty that we behold, sheer ugliness if we did not believe that you will some day share it too.
"Yes, I am a mystic--have joined the one brotherhood that is eternal and all-embracing, as young as love and as old as time--the society that no man suspects till he is close upon it, or hopes to enter till he finds himself in a moment within the sacred pale.