THE ROLE OF PRAYER: Page 123

Nature's forces entails misery, pain and sorrow. These latter seem quite in advance of the enormity of the mistake. "Why should I be smitten so hard for a little thing like that?" that is the angry protest of the sufferer. I shall take it that you have aspired after noble heights of Spiritual Development and the PEACE consequent thereupon. As Emerson puts it: "Let us say then frankly that the education of the Will is the object of our existence. Poverty, the prison, the rack, the fire, the hatred and execration of our fellow-men appear trials beyond the endurance of common humanity, but to the hero whose intellect is aggrandized by the Soul, and so measures the good which his thought surveys against these penalties-the terrors vanish as darkness at sunrise." Have you ever caught a glimpse of the peace that passeth all understanding? Let us listen attentively to what a noble thinker says: "There are moments, supreme and rare moments, that come to the life of the pure and the spiritual when every sheath (the material coatings in and through which the spirit impresses its will upon the Objective Universe) is still and harmonious; when the senses are tranquil, quiet, insensitive; when the mind is serene, calm, and unchanging; when, fixed in meditation, the whole being is steady and nothing that is without may avail to disturb; when love has permeated every fibre; when devotion has illuminated, so that the whole nature is translucent; there is a silence and in the silence is a sudden change; no words