New Light

“ I am endeavoring to show my fellowmen this "new light," whose lustre, also invisible on ordinary occasions, when once seen is so great that it will never again fade from the memory of the beholder. As time progresses, it will continue to penetrate ever more deeply into regions hitherto considered to be impervious to any kind of light; regions whose phenomena have been called supernatural, or, at least, beyond the sphere of the knowledge of man. ”

“ It is a new heaven. Who, that has lived these latter years, that has seen it crashing and breaking through the old one, can deny that what is over us now is a new heaven? The infinite cave of it, scooped out at last over our little naked, foolish lives, our running-about philosophies, our religions, and our governments—it is the main fact about us. Arts and literatures—ants under a stone, thousands of years, blind with light, hither and thither, racing about, hiding themselves. ”

“ So long as daylight lasts, the stir of the busy world and the business of life ward off these thoughts,—the novelty of the scene even combats them; but when night has closed in, and we see above us the stars that we have known in other lands, the self-same moon by whose light we wandered years ago, and then look around and mark the features of a new world, with objects which tell of another hemisphere; and then think that we are there alone, without tie or link to all around us, the sensation is thrilling in its intensity. ”

“ Out of the starless night of the Uncreated, that was before the stars, a soul begins to grope back to light. It gropes its way through strange, half-lighted chambers of Dreams, where in a brown and gold twilight, it sees many things that are dimly significant, true stories twisted into new and amazing shapes, human beings whom it knew long ago, sitting at the windows by dark sunsets, or talking in dim meadows. ”

“ A new world is every day unfolded before me, a world vibrating with light and glowing with colour. I have seen the woods and the hills and the waters before, but never in their gala uniform, and I am simply dazzled. ”

“ A new world is here revealed to your gaze—a world in which the whole miracle of the earth's multiple aspects is epitomised, where the eternal play of light and shade constitutes an ever-changing picture that creates a world-drama in inanimate Nature. ”

“ Let us throw away our candles and our torches. Let us flood our cities with light. Let us bring a new light to men!” ”

“ A holy radiance round the scenes we knew;
A potent power to point lone spirits, grieving,
To deathless Love whose charms are ever new.
It ever shows, "in part," in sweet tuition,
What we shall know when we have gained the light,
When all our highest hopes fade in fruition,
Where the Eternal Summer beameth bright.
THY WORD IS A LIGHT UNTO MY FEET. Oh! Light of Lights! dark, dark is earth's long way,
Cloud upon cloud looms o'er the path I stray ”

“ He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower? ”

“ The origin of the idea of an all-pervading duality and the chains of association which linked Light and the Sun to air and water, and to the male element, whilst Darkness and the Nocturnal Heaven became connected with earth, fire and woman, are clearly accounted for in the circumpolar regions only, where the year divides itself into a period of light in which independent and roaming out-door life was possible, and a period of darkness during which family life, in underground fire-lit dwellings, was compulsory. ”

“ Nay, if the elements of light are ever in the space, and when the flame goes out, return to the vital air, so thought once kindled lives forever around and about us, a part of our breathing atmosphere. Many a thinker, many a poet, may yet illumine the world, from the thoughts which yon genius, that will have no name, gave forth to wander through air, and recombine again in some new form of light. ”

“ That at all distances the new light has a prodigious superiority to the old, from the equality of its effects in all azimuths. 3. That the new light fulfils rigorously the conditions required for the distribution of light to the greatest advantage. ”

“ What then can restore him to like, to energy, to activity, to fellowship and communion with the great world which God has spread around him, and which perhaps in the darkness may be passing away? LIGHT restores him to himself and to nature which seemed lost to him. Naturally, therefore, the primitive men regarded light as the principle of their real existence, without which life would be but one continued weariness and despair. ”

“ A LITTLE lamp can send but a brief and feeble ray,
The great lights bravely beam, and their radiance far away
Is the comfort of the nations and the furtherance of the day.
All men remember when the great lights were lit,
The day is kept in honor, and they name it as they sit
And watch the guiding flame, thanking and blessing it.
But the small and struggling lights which a breath of storm might kill,
Each fain to light a continent, but doomed to smallness still,
Is there no one to praise them for their service of goodwill?
Yes, one, the Lord of all, who is the source of Light ”

“ But he unwrapped each covering himself, and when the last dazzling wrapper was revealed, no human being durst gaze upon that Light. But he who was born of Light looked upon what was hidden in that covering and flung all up through the smoke-hole to take its place in the Firmament of Heaven, where it shines like unto a Sun—to-day, as in those days. And it was given the world to shed its rays of Light upon the earth by day, even as the Moon shines for Light by night, and the Stars sing for joy and gladness that Light came to the world. ”

“ A wondrous change had passed upon the world—or was it not rather that a change more marvellous had taken place in us? Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass was perfectly visible—either by light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out of our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and colour, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. ”

“ The great electric light of the intellect is turned off at the church door. On one day out of every seven the human lamps enter in utter darkness a field of superstition. During six days the light is turned full on the world of commerce, science, art, and literature, and these glow and grow and are examined by its rays. When, however, the signal tolls from the steeple on the seventh day, the light is turned off for that day, and for that topic alone; and then there is brought out once more the old tallow candle of ignorance that hides in shadow the cobwebs of undeveloped thought! ”

“ When daylight has merged into twilight, and twilight has deepened into darkness, myriads of shining points dot the vast expanse of the night sky, and you have been taught that these shining points are the Lamps illumining the abode of your Gods and Goddesses, whom you have regarded as the Messengers of Andûmana̤ the Supreme One. Among those shining points is one gleaming with a soft, silvery radiance, which your Priests have named Inglos ēvecto Fryda̤, which, I am told, would in my language mean Fryda̤'s lamp or light. Truly this silvery point is the Earth world where I dwell. ”

“ Only for this, because Night alienates from thee thy servants, didst thou sow in the regions of space the luminous balls, to proclaim thy omnipotence, thy return, in the times of thy absence. More heavenly than yonder twinkling stars appear the infinite eyes that Night opens in us. Their sight extends farther than the palest of that numberless host; unbeholden to Light, they gaze through the depths of a loving spirit, which fills a loftier space with unspeakable rapture. ”

“ We turn night into day with the glow of lamps that burn without flame, and almost without heat, whose mysterious glow is fed from some distant place, that hang in clusters, banners, letters, in city streets, and that glow like new stars along the treeless prairie horizon where thirty years ago even the beginnings of civilization were unknown. ”

“ Why is Nature in the Golden Age so ethereal? Because the Attribute of Illumination is predominant in that cycle. All is Illumination, within and without. Through this illumination the Golden Age people see the Steady, Changeless substance which is the Life and Light of which the outer universe is but the shadow. And with the spirit of this Changeless Love and Life and Light in One before their mind's vision, they cannot but feel that its distorted, changeful manifestations called objects are made of fabrics of which dreams are made of. ”

“ In these latter days, science has discovered the beginning of the wonders of Light,—they have always existed, but we have not found them, ‘loving darkness rather than light.’ I say the ‘beginning of wonders,’ for with all our advancement we have only become dimly conscious of the first vibration of the Creator’s living presence. Light!—which is ‘God walking in His garden,’—which is colour, sound, heat, movement—all the Divine Power in eternal radiation and luminance!—this is Life;—and in this we live,—in this we may live, and renew our lives,—ay, and in this we may retain youth beyond age! ”

“ It is with a man's soul as it is with nature: the beginning of Creation is—Light. Till the eye have visions the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! ”

“ It is not on the cloudless summer day that familiar objects take on vague and fantastic shapes; to effect that, mists and a rain-veiled sky are wanted. Then distances are blotted out, and the values of nearer objects are transformed under the swirling drifts of vapour, and a new dream-world is created under one's very eyes. ”

“ Left a great path, and down the path there shone
The Light of all the world.
The Light from whose mysterious golden depths
The Sun rose in his might—
The light from whose white, hidden fires were lit
The torches of the night;
The Light that shining on a thing of clay
Giveth it Life and Will:
The Light that with an unknown power can blast
And bid all life be still;
The Light that calls a ray of its own light
A man's undying soul—
The Light that lifts the broken lives of earth,
Touches and makes them whole. ”

“ This light, kindled in the great dark vortex of the Norse Mind, dark but living, waiting only for light; this is to me the centre of the whole. How such light will then shine out, and with wondrous thousand-fold expansion spread itself, in forms and colors, depends not on it, so much as on the National Mind recipient of it. The colors and forms of your light will be those of the cut-glass it has to shine through.—Curious to think how, for every man, any the truest fact is modelled by the nature of the man! ”

“ To a short-sighted person, colours run together and intermix, outlines disappear, blues and reds and yellows become russets or browns, the lamps or candles of an illumination spread into an unmeaning glare, or dissolve into a milky way. He takes up an eye-glass, and the mist clears up; every image stands out distinct, and the rays of light fall back upon their centres. ”

“ Faintly at first, but with increasing splendour, even as dawn floods the sky and heralds the{297} day, dimming the stars and turning the moon to ashes, so the New Spirit permeated her, extinguishing the lesser lights of self-respect which demanded of her an efficient performance, and filling the inter-stellar darkness with the glory of the sun not yet risen upon the earth. ”

“ In describing that which comes to us all at once, there is a difficulty in choosing between what is first and what is last to say: but, interpreting as best I can, I seemed to behold the onward movement of a Light, one among many Lights, all living, throbbing, now dim with perturbations, and now again clear, and all subtly woven together, outwardly in some more shadowy shining, and inwardly in a greater fire, which, though it was invisible, I knew to be the Lamp of the World. ”

“ Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning Nothingness.
We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and receding—and we see the new race—in the hours of the "Great Noon-tide"—fulfilling its Prophet's hope—and we see the end of that also! ”

“ Nothing dispelled that darkness but the dim starlight from above, but now, as we gazed forth, we became aware of a faint light coming feebly toward us from far ahead, a faint light that seemed like a great, feebly-glowing cloud in the darkness, and that was intensifying in radiance with each moment that we rushed toward it. ”

“ It is a new outlook which not only sweeps the distance, but has also to reckon with height, with the piled tiers of houses, with new velocities and new conditions of space. A new blood, money, feeds these cities, a new energy fires them; they are driven to procreate a new faith, a new God, and a new art. ”

“ Yes! the windows of the soul get dimmed and the flame gives no light. Is that the fault of the flame? Clean the windows of the soul; such work is allowed to man, such only, not his to create Light, that was and is from Eternity.
“One day all the several sparks of light will go back to the Great Central Light whence they came, the soul will find God. ... What need to make haste? What need to fret? Every soul must find God at long last ... light will return to Light.” ”

“ You have to stay a long time in the darkness to know just what it is light means.
"They call great men 'great lights.' 'And then came the light,' they say, regarding the solving of some great thing. 'He brought the light'—that's what I wanted to do! They tell about science bringing the light. I know now what a tribute they pay when they say that. Light of understanding, light of truth—and ah, mein liebchen, the light of love—and well do I know how that light can shine into the darkness! ”