Esoteric - Spiritual

If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought to be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all other interests would be subsumed.

A wave of Mysticism is passing over the civilised nations. It is welcomed by many: by more it is mistrusted. Even the minds to which it would naturally appeal are often restrained from sympathy by fears of vague speculative driftings and of transcendental emotionalism. Nor can it be doubted that such an attitude of aloofness is at once reasonable and inevitable.

IT has been well said that the bulwarks of a nation are the mothers. Any contribution to the physical, and hence the mental, perfection of woman should be welcomed alike by her own sex, by the thoughtful citizen, by the political economist, and by the hygienist. Observation of the truths, expressed in a modest, pleasing, and conclusive manner, in the essay of Dr. Galbraith contribute to this end. These truths should be known by every woman, and I gladly commend the essay to their thoughtful consideration.

Who does not remember the story of the Christian missionary in Britain, sitting one evening in the vast hall of a Saxon king, surrounded by his thanes, having come thither to preach the gospel of his Master; and as he spoke of life and death and immortality, a bird flew in through an unglazed window, circled the hall in its flight, and flew out once more into the darkness of the night. The Christian priest bade the king see in the flight of the bird within the hall the transitory life of man, and claimed for his faith that it showed the soul, in passing from the hall of life, winging its way not into the darkness of night, but into the sunlit radiance of a more glorious world.

IN the present edition, it is intended to publish in a collected form the works ascribed to Gildas for which, roughly speaking, a date is assigned during the twenty years that elapsed between A.D. 540 and 560. The earliest references to Gildas that have come down to us are the two made by Columbanus in his letter to St. Gregory the Great, which must have been written between thirty and forty years after the death of the British writer (i.e., A.D. 595-600).

The form of his countenance is like that of a wild beast; his right eye like the star that rises in the morning, and the other without motion; his mouth one cubit; his teeth a span long; his fingers like scythes; the track of his feet of two spans; and in his face an inscription, Antichrist.' A reprint from the 1800s, this is a scanned text book. The authors use apocryphal books in their research to prove the validity of the Antichrist and disproving the Jesus mythology. Interesting read and research.

Many years ago I heard of the existence of this manuscript from a celebrated occultist, since dead; and more recently my attention was again called to it by my personal friend, the well-known French author, lecturer, and poet, Jules Bois, whose attention has been for some time turned to occult subjects. My first-mentioned informant told me that it was known both to Bulwer Lytton and Eliphas Levi, that the former had based part of his description of the sage Rosicrucian Mejnour on that of Abra-Melin, while the account of the so-called observatory of Sir Philip Derval in the Strange Story was to an extent copied from and suggested by that of the magical oratory and terrace, given in the eleventh chapter of the second book of this present work.