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 a day or two after that I went into the Library at Leinster House and asked for an art journal. I stood by a table while the attendant searched for the volume. There was a book lying open there. My eye rested on it. It was a dictionary of religions, I think, for the first word my eye caught was "Aeon" and it was explained as a word used by the Gnostics to designate the first created beings. I trembled through my body. At that time I knew nothing of mystical literature and indeed little of any literature except such tales as a boy reads, and the imaginations which had begun to overwhelm me were to me then nothing but mere imaginations, and were personal and unrelated in my mind with any conception of truth, or idea that the imagination could lay hold of truth. I trembled because I was certain I had never heard the word before, and there rushed into my mind the thought of pre-existence and that this was memory of the past. I went away hurriedly that I might think by myself, but my thoughts drove me back again soon, and I asked the librarian who were the Gnostics and if there was a book which gave an account of their ideas. He referred me to a volume of Neander's Church History, and there, in the