been wont to preserve the most profound silence regarding their knowledge, and hence, when they pass on, their experience and knowledge goes with them. The world receives but little benefit from their superior knowledge. They leave none to carry forward the torch which they have so laboriously lighted. They live rather as spectators of the progress and decay of Nations, and put forth no effort to make confidantes, converts, or disciples.

Vin thought that men and women of genuine genius and inspiration should be brave enough to live for the future.

WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF?

Certain it is that the same disintegrating and destructive influences, the same selfishness, the same love of power, the same struggle for place, the same ignorant theological mass, the same disregard of the rights and privileges of the people, the same immense wealth in the hands of a few members of society, the same abject poverty on the part of the many, accompanied by the same systematic effort on the part of the theological school to gain control of the forces of government, which destroyed Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylonia, and other ancient states, are now actively at work in the fairest portion of the western hemisphere. Should America escape the fate of all the nations which made antiquity illustrious, it will be due in the main to the courage, the energy, the intelligence, the self-reliance of a few brave men and women of thought and

genius. "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson; Scipio, Milton called, 'The height of Rome;' and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." It is to Individuals, rather than to the united efforts of many, that all the milestones of progress, reached by humanity struggling toward Light, are due.

Of the whole of mankind, probably not one in ten thousand has any aspiration beyond the daily needs of the body. For the many, in this age as in all others, in America as elsewhere, God, Soul, Spirit, Life, Immortality, are mere words, conveying no real meaning. For the many, God is only Bel, Moloch, Zeus, or at best, Osiris, Methras, or Adonai, under another name, worshipped with the old Pagan ceremonies and ritualistic formulas. It is the statue of Olympian Jove, worshipped as the Father, in the Christian Church that was a Pagan Temple. It is the statue of Venus become the Virgin Mary. The vast majority of mankind, now as throughout the ages, do not really believe that God is either just or good. They fear his lightning. They dread his wrath. The many only imagine that they believe that there is Life beyond the tomb. Yet they persecute those who profess a superior knowledge to that which they, at best, only think they believe, because it is incomprehensible to them. To the vast majority of so-called Christian people, God is the reflected

image, in infinite space, of the earthly tyrant on his throne; only infinitely powerful, his wrath more implacable, his methods more arbitrary and irscrutable. To curse humanity, the human tyrant need only be, in fact, that which, in every age, the Theological School has pictured God. All over the world, in America as elsewhere, there are Creeds, Dogmas, Ritualistic Forms, the best of which are only less objectionable than the worst. They have little that is true, nothing that is Divine in them. The Theological School has ever postulated as God something more cruel, more relentless, more revengeful, more wicked and treacherous than the most arbitrary tyrant that ever sat on a throne; something like Nero, something that delighted in sacrifice, rather than a better, more beautiful, more just, more loving, more virtuous being that Man.

The Life and Work of Jesus the Essene, presented one of a long series of suggestions that a Gospel of Love might be better adapted to the welfare of the world than a ruthless creed of crime, greed, hatred, sorrow and vengeance; and yet, for seventeen long centuries, the teachings of Jesus-the Gospel of Love, the Fatherhood of God, the Universal Brotherhood of Man,— became the Theology of Hate and Strife and Turmoil, until the basic principles of that doctrine are almost entirely absent from the practice of the Christian Church, and with the result that the Creed is losing its influence. Clergy and Laity alike no longer believe what they profess.

The proof is that they no longer.

live as though they believe it. "By their acts, ye shall know them."

So Vin thought.

After the heat of the day, the night wind blowing down the valley of the Truckee seemed so cold that he had drawn his rug about him, and gazed at the bare gray crags of Peavine mountain, which presented an ever changing panorama in the silvery sheen of the moon silently rising toward the zenith. The mountain air was a tonic. Nowhere in his travels, along the Mediterranean sea, in the Garden of Allah, in the shadows of the Himalayas, in the Orient, or on board a liner in mid-ocean, had he breathed such air. Clear, and dry, and cool, it seemed to Vin that the air currents forming in the frozen zone under the Great Bear, moving southward over eternal snow and ice, over river and lake, over woodland and moor, seasoned by the odor of balsam, fir, hemlock, oak, pine and spruce, tempered by the great Japanese current, are again cooled as they cross the High Sierra and pour like an elixir of life into the beautiful valley of the Truckee. The air filled his lungs without any conscious effort of breathing, as it thrilled and invigorated every fiber of his being.

CHAPTER V.

THE OCEAN OF TIME.

We stand upon the Shore of the Great Ocean of Time. The waves roll in with an infinite sweep and bring to us, now and again, from the vast treasuries of philosophical and religious thought, which lie buried in the unfathomable caves of that unbounded sea, a shell, a pearl, a gem of deepest and purest ray. We do well to gather these lessons of the Ages, ponder them as best we may, listen to the mighty voices as they come to us in broken and fragmentary cadence, whispering from the great bosom of the past.

If the people of this generation were now spending their first day on earth, among the many wonders of the world upon which they might gaze would be the blue, over-arching sky, and greatest of all objects would be the far-off sun, silently moving, as it would seem, across the heavens; and, as the day passed, they would observe that this ball of light and warmth was slowly sinking down into the west. With what peculiar feelings would they note that fact? How all eyes would watch the close of the first day! And as plain, lake, river, and mountains began to grow dim and take on fantastic shapes in the twilight, and the air began to grow chill, with what fear and trembling would they look into each other's eyes, and clasp each other's hands in the darkness! And doubtless there would be