Concerning Revelation

No. IV

CONCERNING REVELATION ¹

ALL true and worthy illuminations are reveilations, or re-veilings. Mark the meaning of this word. There can be no true or worthy illumination which destroys distances and exposes the details of things.

Look at this landscape. Behold how its mountains and forests are suffused with soft and delicate mist, which half conceals and half discloses their shapes and tints. See how this mist like a tender veil enwraps the distances, and merges the reaches of the land with the clouds of heaven!

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How beautiful it is, how orderly and wholesome its fitness, and the delicacy of its appeal to the eye and heart! And how false would be that sense which should desire to tear away this clinging veil, to bring far objects near, and to reduce everything to foreground in which details only should be apparent, and all outlines sharply defined!

Distance and mist make the beauty of Nature: and no poet would desire to behold her otherwise than through this lovely and modest veil.

And as with exoteric, so with esoteric nature. The secrets of every human soul are sacred and known only to herself. The ego is inviolable, and its personality is its own right for ever.

Therefore mathematical rules and algebraic formulæ cannot be forced into the study of human lives; nor can human personalities be dealt with as though they were mere ciphers or arithmetical quantities.

The soul is too subtle, too instinct with life and will for treatment such as this.

One may dissect a corpse; one may analyse and classify chemical constituents; but it is impossible to dissect or analyse any living thing.

The moment it is so treated it escapes. Life is not subject to dissection.

The opening of the shrine will always find it empty: the God is gone.

A soul may know her own past, and may see in her own light: but none can see it for her if she see it not.

Herein is the beauty and sanctity of personality.

The ego is self-centred and not diffused; for the tendency of all evolution is towards centralisation and individualism.

And life is so various, and so beautifully diverse in its unity, that no hard and fast mathematical law-making can imprison its manifoldness.

All is order: but the elements of this order harmonise by means of their infinite diversities and gradations.

The true mysteries remained always content with nature's harmony: they sought not to drag distances into foregrounds; or to dissipate the mountain nebula, in whose bosom the sun is reflected.

For these sacred mists are the media of light, and the glorifiers of nature.

Therefore the doctrine of the mysteries is truly reveilation,--a

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veiling and a re-veiling of that which it is not possible for eye to behold without violating all the order and sanctities of nature.

For distance and visual rays, causing the diversities of far and near, of perspective and mergent tints, of horizon and foreground, are part of natural order and sequence: and the law expressed in their properties cannot be violated.

For no law is ever broken.

The hues and aspects of distance and mist indeed may vary and dissolve according to the quality and quantity of the light which falls upon them: but they are there always, and no human eye can annul or annihilate them.

Even words, even pictures are symbols and veils. Truth itself is unutterable, save by God to God.

Footnotes

9:1 Home, November 27, 1885. Received in sleep. Referred to in Life of Anna Kingsford, vol. ii, p. 246.