Does not sometimes a look or a gesture, familiar in dear old days, flash clear upon you in quick, unsolicited vision, or a tone

sound to you out of an absolute stillness, that "brings right up to you," as we say, the personality you thought vanished? We speak truer than we mean when we say that.

"This do in remembrance of Me," said our Lord.

"And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world."

Are not His sign and assurance the great sign and assurance of all Holy Communion?

"There will be no hindrance." The silver cord is loosed- it is not broken. On the further side it has found some absolute freedom that we know not of; on this side ours -it is still fast to our human thought and experience. We have but to touch it, and the vibration passes; we have but to breathe out of our hearts, and get heart-answers. The spiritual ether is all instinct and alive with messages; the tongues of fire are ready to flash out as they did above the heads of the believing Apostles. It is always Pentecost. For the Holy Ghost is everywhere, and is the Comforter.

"There will be no hindrance." Here there have not been time, fitting opportunity, claim, and reason for our approach to those to whom in inward reverence, gratitude, honor, wishful regard we have silently and unknown drawn near. There has not even, perhaps, been contemporaneousness. We feel as if we had been "off schedule time" in so much of our life's journeying!

There, is all time; all contemporaneousness; it is what we mean by eternity. There is no crowding out, no limitation; no impossibility of numbers, no severity of demand, is in the way of a true seeking, a true response, full understanding, separate and sufficient value, individual recognition and interchange. Do you ever think how rich we already are in this? What an opening there is of the gates for us also, when the great spirits of the age go up, one by one, and enter in, that, like their Master, they may come again with a wider reach, a closer hold, a fuller power? How they belong now, each one of them, to each one of us! Ah, there is no loneliness, no shutting out, when we feel free, this way, to choose our friendships as we will,

as we are

capable, out of the grand society of the centuries!

"There shall be no hindrance." The solitudes, the neglects, the misplacings, the unkind. denials, — all the little things, and the mean things, of the earth, will be over, will have passed away. The unfulfilled will come to its fulfillment; it will learn with joy what it has waited for. And the joy of the great welcoming angels in that Kingdom of the True will be to reach forth the strong, generous, lifting hand to the very least who, tired and sorry with the world, comes to the tender cherishing, the careful encouraging, the loving comradeship of that new sphere to which only the heart, not the circumstance, of the earlier, harder, testing life can enter.

I will bring them all, said the Lord of Humanity, "and there shall be one fold and one Shepherd."

"I am the Door: by me ye shall go in and out, and find pasture."

"Who is the King of Glory?"

"The Lord of hosts, He is the King of Glory!"

VIII

ABOUT CLOTHES

Now, if you please, a word about clothes. Did clothes originate only and wholly with the knowledge of evil? Are they the badge and the bother, simply, of a depraved humanity? Or is the instinct of clothing and adorning the body something that once had the primal innocence in it, and possibly came into Eve's head in some fashion long before her intimacy with the serpent?

There she was among the flowers, the brightwinged insects, the soft-plumed birds of Paradise. Do you suppose she never twisted blossoms in her hair, or wreathed a vine around her shoulders, or wove crown, or bracelet, or necklace of beautiful dropped feathers or many-tinted leaves? Evidently, when she came to making coverings in earnest, she had the facility of her fingers ready.

Ah, it was only that the innocence was gone

the happy thought changed to a sense of shame. Clothing was not so much because of degradation, as that it became itself degraded when sin came. The knowledge of good would not have hindered—it would only have made more exquisitely graceful and expressivehuman attire, which would inevitably have been desired and needed. The knowledge of evil marred everything; put a vain, unworthy, sensuous consciousness in the place of a selfless delight in loveliness and use. And saying that, we say precisely what demands saying as to the evil frivolities of the world we live in to-day.

Be clothed; but be in your right mind. Doth not God clothe the lilies?

The consideration of dress-of outer pre

sentment

comes at once with social living. It is almost the first question. How shall we appear apparel ourselves to make our personality true, fit, pleasing? It is a right question. It concerns a duty.

Each individual is responsible for just his or her own share and representation of the beauty, dignity, and possible perfection of the human form and presence. If clothing does