Theosophy and the Number
Seven
A selection of articles
relating to the esoteric
significance
of the Number 7 in Theosophy
The Seven Rays
By
Ernest Wood
(First
printed: 1925)
CONTENTS
PART -1- THE SOURCE OF
THE RAYS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The
Pillar of Light 3
II Consciousness 9
III Thought-Power13
IV Love-Power 20
V Will-Power25
VI Matter, Energy and
Law 33
VII The
Divine and the Material 37
VIII Harmony 42
IX The
Seven Principles 49
X Inter-Relations 54
PART -II- THE SEVEN RAYS
XI The First Ray 63
XII The
Second Ray 73
XIII The
Third Ray 82
XIV The
Fourth Ray 89
XV The
Fifth Ray 97
XVI The
Sixth Ray 102
XVII The
Seventh Ray 107
XVIII A Master's
Table 116
PART III- THE GREAT USE AND DANGER OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE RAYS
XIXYour
Ray 131
XXProgress
without Danger 138
XXIStages
of Self-Realisation
145
GLOSSARY153
PART 1
THE SOURCE OF THE RAYS
There are seven Forces in Man and in all Nature. The real substance
of
the Concealed
(Sun) is a nucleus of Mother-Substance. It is the Heart and Matrix of all the
living and existing
Forces in our Solar Universe. It is the Kernel
from which
proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the Powers that set in
action the Atoms,
in their fundamental duties, and the Focus within which they
again meet in
their Seventh Essence every eleventh year. He who tells thee he
has seen the
Sun, laugh at him, as if he had said that the Sun moves really
onward in his
diurnal path.
It is on account of this septenary nature
that the Sun is spoken of by the
ancients as one who
is driven by seven horses equal to the metres of the
Vedas;
or, again, that,
though he is identified with the seven Gana (Classes
of Being)
in his orb, he
is distant from them, as he is, indeed; as also that he has Seven
Rays, as indeed he has.
The Seven Beings in the Sun are the Seven Holy Ones, self-born from
the inherent power in the Matrix of Mother-Substance. It is they who send the
seven principal Forces, called Rays, which, at the beginning of Pralaya, will centre into seven new Suns for the next Manvantara. The energy from which they spring into
conscious existence in every Sun is what some people call Vishnu, which is the
Breath of the Absoluteness.
Occult Aphorisms, quoted in The Secret Doctrine
CHAPTER I
THE PILLAR OF LIGHT
I see no means to avoid, in the writing of this book, and the
putting
forth of what I
hope are clear ideas about the Rays, certain matters of a rather
abstract character,
and foremost among them a statement about the universality
of God or
Brahman, whom some regard as living far away on a high plane somewhere beyond
our vision. The fact is that the Sachchidananda
Brahman.
The term Brahman, neuter, applies to the entire trinity of Shiva,
Vishnu and Brahma, but Brahma, masculine, is the third member of that trinity]
is here and now, before us and with us every day. Analyse
the entire world of your experience, and you will find that it is composed of
three parts: there is first a great mass of objects of all kinds, which are
material on every plane, however high; secondly, there are vast numbers of
living beings, with consciousness evolved in various degrees; and thirdly,
there is yourself. The first of these three is the world of sat, existence; the
second is that of chit, consciousness; and the third is ânanda,
happiness, the true self.
This will be better understood if we recall the story of the great
pillar of
light. The great
being Nârâyana, Vishnu, the soul and life of the
Universe,
thousand-eyed and
omniscient, was reclining upon his couch, the body of the
great serpent Sesha or Ananta, endless time,
which lay coiled up on the waters
of space, for
it was the night of being. Then Brahma, the great creator
of the world of
being, called sat, came to him and touched him with his hand,
and said:
"Who art thou?" And an argument arose between those two as to who was
the greater, and while this was going on, and as it threatened to become
furious, there appeared before them a great pillar of fire and
light, incomparable and indescribable, which astonished the disputants so much
that they forgot their quarrel and agreed to search for the end of so wonderful
a thing.
Vishnu plunged downwards for a thousand years, but he could not
find its
base, and Brahma
flew upwards for a thousand years, but he could not find its
top, and both
returned baffled. Then Shiva, whose nature is ânanda,
stood before them and explained that they two were one in him their overlord,
the pillar of light, who was three in one, and that in the coming age Brahma
would be born
from Vishnu, and
Vishnu should cherish him, until at the end of it they both
should see their
overlord again.
People sometimes think that by going upwards they may find God, but
the truth is that even were they to go downwards below their present state and
search for a thousand years they could not find the end of Him. This does not
mean that
He is here but invisible and unknown to us. He is here visible and
known; for the
world that we see
with our eyes is His sat, and the consciousness by which we
know it is His
chit, and the self that we cannot but affirm ourselves to be is
His ânanda. Each one of
us is in that pillar of light, no matter where he may
move in the space
of being, nor where he may go in the time of consciousness.
And no man will ever escape these three realities: he cannot say:
"I am not"; he
cannot say: "I
am unconscious"; not can he at last fail to rest his knowledge
upon the outer
world of being. Though there be millions of worlds within worlds
and beings
within beings, sat, chit and ânanda are everywhere
present, and
everywhere in one. The
things that 5) we see and touch and taste and smell and hear are sat, true
being, and in that realm of being no man will ever escape from that upon which
all rely, the evidence of their senses, even though his clairvoyance may extend
through all possible planes up the pillar of light.
God the Universe, the Sachchidananda
Brahman, is not composed of three realities put together B sat, chit and ânanda -but That [We need here a
new pronoun. English writers have long been feeling the necessity of one that
will comprise both he and she, and yet be singular in number; but here we want
one to include the sense of it as well] spreads itself out in space and time,
in what is called manifestation, where and when the qualities of sat and chit
come into activity amid the mysterious cyclic changes that go on in the life of
the eternal
super-being.
We find ourselves in such a dual world of matter and consciousness,
the great
passive and active
principles. In the seventh chapter of The Bhagavad-Gita Shri
are the
eightfold division of My manifestation." The last word is prakriti,
translated variously as
"matter" and as "nature", but manifestation expresses
the idea of it, as
the word comes from kri, "to make or do",
with the
preposition pra, which means "forth".
It may strike some students as strange that these eight
manifestations should be mentioned together as though they formed one class,
and should be described in the next verse as "My lower
manifestation". There is a good reason for that, however, for they are in
one class, although they fall into two subdivisions within it, composed of the
first five and the last three respectively. The first five words name the five
planes of human evolution -earth is the physical plane, water the astral, fire
the mental, air the buddhic, and ether the atmic or nirvanic. The Sanskrit
word which is here translated ether is akasha, and this is regarded as the
root-matter of the five planes under consideration. These five planes must be
regarded for our present purpose in one eyeful, if I may use such an
expression, as one world having five degrees or grades of density in its
matter; we must disregard the steps which these degrees of density make, and
think of the whole as one world shading imperceptibly downwards, from the
highest point to the lowest.
The remaining three divisions of "My manifestation" are manas, buddhi and
ahamkara. Here we
have the atma-buddhi-manas familiar to Theosophists.
They are three faculties or powers of consciousness. Ahamkara
means literally "I-making', and agrees with the Theosophical conception of
atma. Manas is the faculty with which consciousness cognises the material aspect of the world; buddhi is that with which it becomes aware of the
consciousness within that world, and ahamkara or atma is that with which it individualises
these experiences and so makes for each of us "my world" and "my
consciousness".
This last faculty knows the one I, but it manifests it in a
thousand or a million apparent I's.When Shri Krishna throws consciousness and matter into the same
class, he does not suggest that consciousness is in any way superior to matter
or above it.
We are not to think that consciousness is manifested in a fivefold
world from above that world; matter and consciousness are equal partners, two
aspects of one manifestation. It is not that life or consciousness manifests in
the material
world from above
with different degrees of power. The world is just as much a
world of life as
of matter; the two are mixed together, and on the whole
equally.
To understand this, consider the following. In the physical level
of the world
we seem to be
in a world of matter. The matter is so obvious, so prominent, so
dominant, so
ever-present, that we have some difficulty in recognising
the
existence of any life
at all in this plane, and even then we find only sparks
or points of it
embodied in men, animals and other beings. It looks very much
like a great
world of matter in which only a tiny bit of life incarnates. When
one enters on
the astral plane one finds a change from this state; there the
matter is a little
less dominant and the life a little more evident B the powers
of
consciousness are more influential and the limitations of matter less rigid,
obstructive and
resistive. At the next level, the lower mental, life is a degree
more prominent
still, and matter yet less dominant. Thus the three planes,
physical, astral, and
lower mental, constitute a region in which we may say
there is more
matter than life.
Now consider the highest of the five planes. Here the conditions
are quite the
reverse of those in
the physical world. It is a great unresting sea of
the
powers of consciousness.
When the initiate of the fourth degree enters that
plane for the
first time he cannot immediately discover any matter or form at
all. It is as
difficult to find matter there as it is to find consciousness in
the physical
plane. Some evidence of this is to be seen in the attempt to
describe the nirvanic plane which was made by C.W.Leadbeater
in his article on
the subject in
The Inner Life. In the comparison that we have been making the
buddhic plane may be
said to offer reverse conditions to those which prevail on
the astral, and
the higher mental to those of the lower mental.
Suppose, then, that a visitor from some other state of being should
enter our
fivefold field of
manifestation. If he happened to come into it at the physical
level he would
describe it as a world of matter in which there are points of
life, centres of
consciousness; but if he touched it at its atmic or nirvanic
level he would
call it a world of consciousness in which there are some points
of matter.
These principles are shown in the following diagram:
GOD THE UNIVERSE
BRAHMA:SAT (The World of Things- Earth,Water, Fire, Air, Ether)
VISHNU:CHIT (The World of Consciousness-
Atma, Buddhi, Manas SHIVA:
ANANDA (The Self, Real Life)
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES
7 Tamas (Matter)
6 Rajas
Natural Energy
5 Sattva (Natural)
4
Represented by Mâyâ
3 Kriyâ (Manas)
2 Jnâna (Buddhi)
1 Ichchhâ (Atma)
CHAPTER II
CONSCIOUSNESS
In Hindu and Theosophical books the terms ichchha,
jnana, and kriya are
employed to indicate
the three essential constituents of consciousness. Those
words are usually
and quite accurately translated as will, wisdom and activity,
but the
significance of the English words in this connection will not be
understood unless it is
clearly realized that they refer to states of
consciousness and nothing
else.
The three states of consciousness link the being who
has them to the three great
worlds B ichchha or will to the self, jnana
or wisdom to the world of
consciousness itself, and kriya or activity to the world of things or being.
Therefore jnana is the very essence of
consciousness.
When we see the great scope of these three states we may realize
the inadequacy
of their
English names, which in fact draw attention principally to the positive
or
outward-working aspect of each of them. Consciousness is ever two-fold -as
being receptive or
aware, and as being active and influential, or, in other
words, as
possessing faculties and powers. Each of its three states is both a
faculty and a power.
Ichchha is our
consciousness of self, and also the power that is will. Jnana
is
our consciousness
of others, and also 10) the power that is love. And
kriya is our
consciousness of things, and also the power that is thought.
Consciousness can never be seen on any plane with any sort of
clairvoyance; only being can be seen B but consciousness can be experienced,
and is of course being experienced by every conscious being. Let us realise that however splendid amid the relativity of things
may be the being aspect of a jivatma or living self
on the higher planes, it still belongs to the world of things or sat.
Again, consciousness is not subject at any time or on any plane to
the limitations of sat, or, to express the same fact in another way, which is
not without danger of causing misapprehension, it can be and is everywhere at
once, and to go from one place to another it need not cross intervening space.
It crosses only time. If,
for example, I
ask you to walk from one place to another, and after you have
done it I
question: "What were you doing? Were you moving?" I should expect the
answer: "No, I was not moving," And if I press the matter further and
question: "What then were you doing " I
should expect the reply: "I was thinking; I was perceiving the motion of
the body."
It is only by inference from observation through the senses that
human beings
know the position
and motion of their own bodies. If you are sleeping in a
Pullman berth on the railway, and the
train is running smoothly, you cannot tell
whether you are
going head or feet first; but when you let up the blind and look
at the lights and
shadowy objects flitting by, you infer that you go head first,
and then invest
the body with the supposed sensation of motion in that
direction.
When this freedom from space limitations that is enjoyed by
consciousness is
understood and
remembered, it is possible to obtain accurate ideas of the nature
of the will,
wisdom and activity of conscious operations.
CHIT OR CONSCIOUSNESS
FORM AWARENESS OF: ACTS AS:
Ichchhâ SelfWillpower
JnânâOthers Love-power
KriyâThings or objects Thought-power
When men speak of God they do not, as a rule, think of the
Universal
God of whom I have spoken, but imagine One
who is the supreme consciousness of our solar system. He is one consciousness
and it is that in which we all take part B not that it is divided among us, but
that we share in it with Him.
That great consciousness, called by Theosophists the solar Logos,
shows the three powers of will, wisdom and activity. He is of Vishnu in
essence, but His will puts Him in touch with Shiva and His activity with
Brahma. But by analogy these aspects of that Vishnu have been called also
Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma. Though these personifications are misleading, I
mention them because I want to tell the story of our Vishnu's creation of His
world.
First of all Brahma was sent forth to wield the creative power or
divine
activity. It is
recounted in the books for the understanding of men that He
performed His work by
sitting in meditation, and that as He meditated the worlds
took form under
the power of His thought. Such was His activity. It was Vishnu
who then entered
into the material world and filled it with life, and Shiva with
His power that is Self who was there
as its super-being.
12) The true Brahma is outside consciousness, but this Brahma is
not,
being only a
personification of the kriya of our solar Logos. I
tell the story
only to show that
the creative activity was not action with hands and feet in
space, but what we
call thought. The matter of space in the world of sat is
touched by the power
of kriya, and takes form under its influence.
THE UNIVERSAL GOD
BRAHMA (Being) VISHNU (Consciousness) SHIVA (Happiness)
SOLAR LOGOS
Secondary Brahmâ (Solar Kriyâ)Secondary Vishnu (Solar Jnâna)Secondary
Shiva (Solar Ichchhâ)
CHAPTER III
THOUGHT POWER
What is true of the three powers of consciousness of Vishnu is true
of
those of any man,
for all our powers are part of that great consciousness B just
as the
materials of our bodies, with their properties, are taken from the great
sea of material
being. It is the thought in any person that is his activity as a
man. This
activity is twofold, whether you consider the universal or the
apparently particular
being.
(1) It is to be found in the faculty of discrimination that is
behind all perception. No man passively perceives. There is no such thing as
the passive reception of modifications in consciousness, and all perception is
rather of the nature of looking out of a window to see what passes by. The
things of the world will never break in upon anybody's consciousness. But
consciousness, when it is active, opens itself to the perception of things, and
thus has what, if we are very careful, we may be permitted to call a negative
aspect.
(2) It also acts in a positive manner, so that every thought
carries with it the power over things that the thought of the solar Brahma
exerted in the beginning.
(3) This truth about the activity of consciousness as distinct from
the action of matter solves the problem of action and inaction which troubles
so many students of The Bhagavad-Gita.
4) In the Western world there is most dire confusion about the
relation
between will and
desire, and much discussion as to which of these works the body and thus causes
its actions in the world. The answer to that problem is that
neither will nor
desire directly operates the body. Thought or kriya
is the only
power that deals
with things, and it is with thought-power, kriyashakti,
that
the body has
been built and that all its activities that are not reflex are
performed. In
illustration of this I will observe that whenever you pick up your
pen from the
table, you do it by thought-power. Lookers-on might say that they
saw you pick up the
pen with your hand, but it was the thought that lifted the
hand. There has
been a glimpse of the truth about this matter thrown into
European psychology in the theory that Monsieur Emil Coue has put forward, that whenever there is a conflict in
the human mind between will and thought [It has been pointed out that the word
"Imagination" is often used in this connection.
When it is so used, however, it means an image in the mind B that
is, a settled
thought, a
steppingstone in the process of thought. Thought is like walking. You
put a foot down
and rest it on the ground. Then you swing your body along, with that foot as a
point of application for the forces of the body against the
earth. At the end
of the movement you bring down the other foot; and then you
relieve the first
one, poising the body in motion on the new pivot. Transition
and poise thus
alternate in thought. The Thought-image is a poise -a thought or
idea; the
transition from it to another is thinking, when the process is
logical. How the
imagination-process differs from the thought-process is
logical. How the
imagination-process differs from the thought-process is
explained in Chapter
XIV. A distinction must be drawn between imagination as a
process, and the
production and power of mental images] it is always thought
that wins the
day. That is true if we remember that we are thinking of results
in action in
the world, and also if we take care to observe that in the
statement the term
"will" is wrongly used. The theory is true, but its
expression in English
is clumsy.
The power over the body of a steady and clear mental picture is
well shown in
this example, and
it can be employed to restore the body to health or to help to
keep it in that
condition, as Monsieur Coue claims. It is also
constantly
effective in many
other ways that people do not usually notice. Mr. Clarence
Underwood, the well-known American commercial artist, and painter
of the "school girl complexion" pictures for a famous brand of soap,
tells how thought-power moulded the face and form of
his little daughter. Many years ago," he says, "I suddenly stopped
painting the blonde woman who had dominated my work, and began to draw a girl.
People asked me who she was, and I truly could not tell them. She was certainly
not the model that I was using, nor any combination of several models. She was
herself, and to me, at least, an ideal type. My little daughter, Valerie, was
then six years old, and she loved that dark girl intensely. She would come into
the studio, and stand behind my chair, and watch me paint, until discovered and
dragged protestingly away. For years I drew that one
face with little variation. When Valerie was a young lady, some fifteen years
later, she was the living image of that pictured face which I had drawn so many
years before. I know that her love and admiration for those pictures were
responsible for it.
Old friends of mine, when they met my daughter, would exclaim at
the resemblance, although at the time when I painted the pictures Valerie was
nothing but a baby, with no more resemblance to the face on the canvas than I
myself had. Her actual looks were changed to conform with
the pictured face which she loved, and this same result may happen to any girl.
The American girl of today is more nearly the result of the artist's ideal than
she herself can possibly know."
Belief in this power is now very widespread in
several of the
famous artists of that country consider that in producing
beautiful pictures of the
human face and form they are playing a prominent part
in the rapid
development of a splendid new nation. Their pictures are well
printed, and
circulated by hundreds of millions in the magazines, and on the
beautiful billboards
of the country B for beauty has won a real and lasting
place in American
commerce.
The young people of both sexes, and often the older ones as well,
look at those pictures, and long "to be like that". Mr. Harrison
Fisher says that when a young girl strongly admires a type of beauty that she
has seen, she unconsciously forms herself by her thinking of it into some
semblance of the pictured face, and that this is a proved effect which every
artist has observed. Mr. Howard Chandler Christy, whose opinion is constantly
sought in the beauty contests of
Very similar to these effects is that of the pre-natal influence of
a mother's
thought, when it is
strong and not changeable. This was an idea of the old Greek
mothers, who used to
contemplate the statues in order to make their children
beautiful. Mrs. Ruth
J. Wild, of
a contest in
which she had to compete with many other beautiful girls, tells how
during a time of
great material and emotional difficulty, when she was left
alone in the
world, she determined that her baby should be a beautiful girl. She
frequented the
and Adonis. She
carried with her also a magazine cover, depicting a head by the
artist Boileau, and constantly pictured in her mind the beautiful
daughter that
was to be. When
the child did come it was a girl, and, said Mrs. Wild: "All that
I had dreamed about and hoped for had been built into the most
beautiful child
in the world.
The doctors said that they had never seen any baby like her, and
one of them,
knowing that I was still in destitute circumstances, offered me
twenty thousand
dollars for the baby. All the money in the world could not have
bought her,
however, for I knew that I had succeeded. Looking into her
little face I could
see that it was the image of the Boileau painting,
and I
knew then that
her figure would develop along the lines of beauty of my statues.
Her figure has developed along those lines, and to this day she has
the same
bright-coloured hair, the same
dark eyelashes and, when her face is in repose,
the exact
expression of my Boileau picture, that I carried
about so long and
looked at so
earnestly".
Another case is that of Mrs. Virginia Knapp, of
growing infant, for
it is well-known that there is no nervous connection between
mother and unborn
child.
That thought can affect the minds of others even at a distance, and
also leave
its impression
on physical matter, are facts thoroughly proved, and I can bear
witness to having
seen this effect produced hundreds of times with perfect
accuracy and often
under test conditions in
I will not dwell upon the more familiar activities of thought that
govern our
daily lives and
make our material environment highly civilised. Every
department
of human achievement
and culture comes within its power B philosophy, the drama, science, religion
and art; all applied to the smallest details of daily life.
"Everything", said Emerson,
"is fluid to thought". Truly in course of time men
will with its
power solve more of the problems of life and nature, and
bring still
greater forces into human service, let us hope with an ever-increasing devotion
to human brotherhood, turned to an ever-advancing realisation
of the spiritual purpose of human life.
CHAPTER IV
LOVE POWER
As kriya, thought, is used for gaining
knowledge about material things
and their
relationships, and is also the creative power in material life, so
jnana acquaints us
with the consciousness of living things and exerts the great
power of love upon
and among them. Jnana is wisdom, which is very
different from knowledge.
The books rightly say that all our knowledge about things in avidya, ajnana, but those terms
have both been translated ignorance, when they ought to have been translated unwisdom. Avidya carries this
somewhat reprehensible significance only when reference is made to knowledge by
itself, not linked with jnana. Jnana-vijnanasahita,
that is wisdom together with knowledge, is the true
wisdom that will
lead humanity to perfection, for directed by wisdom all
knowledge becomes
profitable to the inner self Shri Krishna made the
meaning of wisdom perfectly clear in two verses in the Gita: when he was
speaking of the possessions that men can use in the service of God for the
benefit of mankind. He said:
Better than the sacrifice of any material object is the offering of
wisdom,
because all works
without exception at last build up only wisdom. If you would
realize this you
must reverence the divine in all things, try to understand, and
practise service.
Then the wise ones who see the truth will direct you to wisdom
Surely he was pointing out that all the work that men have done in
the
world in the long
course of history has perished into dust, but that the fruit
of that work
nevertheless exists as wisdom in the human soul, and also that that
wisdom is no mere
knowledge of things, to be accumulated by thought, but is the realisation of life. The distinction between a wise man and
a man of knowledge is clear, whatever may be the
department of his work in the world. If he is a statesman or a teacher, for
example, he will not have some preconceived idea or plan to which he will try
to compel the people or the children to submit
themselves, but he will
be highly sensitive to the living conditions of those
with whom he has
to deal -to their thoughts and feelings and the state of their
consciousness- and he will
respect those things as much as the engineer respects
the properties
of steel and timber in his plans. It is not the man who knows the
most about a
subject who can best teach it, but the one who is sensitive to
life, and is
therefore able to realize the consciousness of his pupils. For that
he needs
something more than knowledge gained by study; he requires experience of the
heart, springing from sympathy, and contact of life with life.
Who is wiser in all the world than the
mother who unconsciously places her little
child's happiness
before all else? Wisdom is therefore a kind of sublimated
feeling; or rather
it is a sublime feeling, because it is essential in the soul,
not transmuted
from something else below. It has what with caution might be
described its negative
aspect in sympathy or sensitiveness to other's life, and
its positive form
is the power of love.
It is this wisdom that is the real human feeling, and its
corruption is desire.
Wisdom is love of living beings, of life; but desire is love of
things. If a man
is full of desire
for great material possessions or power or fame in the world,
there is still,
behind all that, the longing for greater life. But as he makes
the mistakes of
thinking of himself as a material thing, merely as a
body with a set
of thoughts and feelings attached to it, his notion of increased
life leads him
solely to the enlargement of his bodily possessions and power,
and he is
unconscious of the fact that his neighbours are
living beings B to him
they are nothing
more than animate complex material mechanisms, and he only
thinks of them with
liking or disliking as they fit in with or obstruct his own
desires and plans.
But the wise man is sensitive to life in those other beings. He
feels it on the instant and can make no plans without taking it into
consideration, and the love that thus fills his life enlarges it without any
grasping on his part. For him the pursuit of fame is not possible; he is not
anxious to occupy the minds of others with thoughts of himself, that he may be
enlarged and multiplied in them; rather would he fill his own mind and life
with them and their interests and needs, through his own universal sympathy.
Love introduces us to life, not only physically, leading to our
birth in the
world; but also
every moment of our lives it opens up in ready sensitiveness and
leads us to new
experience and duty. Every one has a picture in mind of the
old-fashioned miser, who
used to go down into his cellar or up to his garret,
candle in hand, and
lock himself in to gloat over his treasure, to pour his gold
and jewels over
neck and arms, and bathe in them with morbid pleasure. And yet
it was no
pleasure, for the man was always full of fear, jumping at every moving
shadow cast by his
flickering candle, starting at every sound; and it was
literally true that
that man's selfishness brought with it a shrinking from
contact with others,
a terrible narrowing of his life. But love expands and
casts out fear,
and makes man man. It is the real human feeling, and
when men
lose it they have
lost their very lives, though their bodies may be moving
about.
A story that is sometimes heard in
thought and how the
dictates of love must be followed where human life
is