Opening Remarks
There is a glory of life hidden and concealed behind its littleness. It will slowly unfold with passage of time through the long process of a difficult evolution.
The mighty Witness
Assenting to Nature’s long slow-moving toil,
Watching the works of his own Ignorance,
Unknown, unfelt the mighty Witness lives
And nothing shows the Glory that is here.
The Divine Witness sits unseen behind nature which veils Him by her works. Yet it is for Him that she was made and will slowly and progressively reveal with passage of time.
Silence behind the cry of Life
A Wisdom governing the mystic world,
A Silence listening to the cry of Life,
It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream
Towards the still greatness of a distant hour.
There is a Wisdom concealed in the Silence that watches the works of Time. It is hidden behind the cry of life. It is there behind her fugitive feet. It knows the great goal towards which life is moving.
A hidden key
This huge world unintelligibly turns
In the shadow of a mused Inconscience;
It hides a key to inner meanings missed,
It locks in our hearts a voice we cannot hear.
Outwardly this world seems to be a machine that is somehow running without any purpose or direction to it. This is so because we see it through the darkness of Inconscience that covers up the real purpose and shows us only the limited surface appearances. But deep within there is a hidden key, the soul, that knows the secret purpose of creation. Lost in the noise of the outer world, drowned in the countless voices we are unable to hear its voice.
Labour of the Spirit
An enigmatic labour of the spirit,
An exact machine of which none knows the use,
An art and ingenuity without sense,
This minute elaborate orchestrated life
For ever plays its motiveless symphonies.
Always behind the minutely devised machine there is the breath and labour of the spirit. We see the art and hear the symphonies of life but the musician and the artist and the secret motive remains concealed to human ignorance.
The greater plan remains hidden to our sight
The mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth;
It studies surface laws by surface thought,
Life’s steps surveys and Nature’s process sees,
Not seeing for what she acts or why we live;
It marks her tireless care of just device,
Her patient intricacy of fine detail,
The ingenious spirit’s brave inventive plan
In her great futile mass of endless works,
Adds purposeful figures to her purposeless sum,
Its gabled storeys piles, its climbing roofs
On the close-carved foundations she has laid,
Imagined citadels reared in mythic air
Or mounts a stair of dream to a mystic moon:
Transient creations point and hit the sky:
A world-conjecture’s scheme is laboured out
On the dim floor of mind’s incertitude,
Or painfully built a fragmentary whole.
Slow and painful is the labour, hidden is the purpose and the greater plan that the surfaces of creation conceal. We look at outer life and cannot surmise or imagine what lies underneath.
The mind only studies the processes but not the purpose, its imaginations and creative outbursts, its mystic dreams point some high secrecy or try to discover the certitude it has lost. The secret sense of unity is painfully and precariously built but lasts only awhile. Thus the world march goes on, ill understood by the human mind yet moved by the secret Spirit’s hidden powers towards its fathomless goal.
A mystery recondite
Impenetrable, a mystery recondite
Is the vast plan of which we are a part;
Its harmonies are discords to our view
Because we know not the great theme they serve.
We know not this greater plan and the mysterious purpose that our existence serves and of which we are a part. We see a small part and therefore find the music a discord or shut in our immediate concerns we miss the theme of life that runs below the surfaces.
Closing Remarks
There is a surface life and its instruments evolved with struggle out of the Inconscient. There is behind it the secret Spirit that uses them unknown to our surface minds.
