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Page 5
THE BROTHERS.
AN ALLEGORY.
DEDICATION, TO ONE WHO WILL UNDERSTAND IT:
'I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
I love thee purely, us they turn from praise
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee dearer after death.'
The Creator still loved and guarded the earth, although its children had
departed from their early obedience. In evidence of His care, He sent,
from time to time, gifted spirits among men to aid them in developing
and elevating the souls so fallen from their primal innocence. These
spirits He clad in sensuous bodies, that they might be prepared to enter
the far country of Human Life. Earth was rapidly falling under the
merciless rule of a hopeless and crushing materialism, when He
determined upon sending among men, Anselm, the saint; Angelo, the tone
artist; Zophiel, the poet; and Jemschid, the painter. The spirits
murmured not, although they knew they were to relinquish their heaven
life for that torment of perpetual struggle which the forbidden
knowledge of Good and Evil has entailed upon all incarcerated in a human
form.
_For self-abnegation is the law of heaven!_
* * * * *
'Brothers,' said the merciful Father, 'go, and sin not, for of all
things that pass among men must a strict account be rendered. For are
not their evil deeds written upon the eternally living memory of a just
God? Evil lurks in the land of your exile; it may find its way into your
own hearts, for you are to become wholly human, and to lose for a time
the memory of your home in heaven. But even in that far country you will
find the Book of Life, which I have given for the guidance and
consolation of the fallen. For it is known even there that 'God is
Love!''
* * * * *
Then the journey of the Heaven Brothers began through the blinding
clouds and trailing mists of chaos, in whose palpable gloom all memories
are obliterated. Naked, trembling, and human, they arrived upon the
shifting sands of the world of Time and Death.
A vague, shadowy sense, like a forgotten dream which we struggle vainly
to recall, often flitted through their clay-clogged souls, of a
strangely glorious life in some higher sphere; but all attempts to give
definite form to such bewildering visions ended but in fantastic
reveries of mystic possibilities or dim yearnings of unseen glories.
They found the Book of Life, but they remembered not that the Father had
told them the Word was His.
For the thread of _Identity_, on which are strung the pearls of
_Memory_, in the passage through chaos had snapped in twain!
* * * * *
Like the silver light through the storm clouds flitting over the fair
face of the moon, gleam the antenatal splendors through the gloom of the
earth life.
As Anselm wonderingly turned the pages of the Book of Life, strange
memories awoke within him. So inextricably were the dreams of his past
woven with the burning visions of the Prophets, that the darkness of
Revelation, like the heaven vault at midnight, was illumined by the
light of distant worlds; his own vague reminiscences supplying the inner
sense of the inspired but mystic leaves. What wonder that he loved the
Book, when in its descriptions of the life to _come_, he felt the
history of the life already _past_; and through its sternest
threatenings, like the rainbow girdling storm clouds, shone the promise
of a blessed future!
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