Towards democracy

Towards Democracy 5

Not as in a dream. The earth remains and daily life remains, and the scrubbing of doorsteps, and the house and the care of the house remains; but Joy fills it, fills the house full and swells to the sky and reaches the stars: all Joy!

O freed soul! soul that has completed its relation to the body! O soaring, happy beyond words, into other realms passing, salutations to you, freed, redeemed soul!

?

What is certain, and not this? What is solid?—the rocks? the mountains? destiny ?

The gates are thrown wide open all through the universe. I goto and fro—through the heights and depths I go and I return: All is well.

I conceive the purport of all suffermg. ‘The blear-eyed boy, famished in brain, famished in body, shivering there in his

rags by the angle of the house, is become divine before me; I hold him long and silently by the hand and pray to him. T conceive a millennium on earth—a millennium not

of riches, nor of mechanical facilities, nor of intellectual

facilities, nor absolutely of immunity from disease, nor absolutely of immunity from pain; but a time when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies—shall attain freedom and joy ;

And the men and women of that time looking back with something like envy to the life of to-day, that they too

might have borne a part in its travail and throes of birth. All is well: to-day and a million years hence, equally.

To you the whole universe is given for a garden of delight,

and to the soul that loves, in the great coherent Whole, the