Page:The Great Secret.djvu/244

228 noble or fantastic conceptions. They are the devils who haunt the earth and cloud the brains of those still in the flesh. These are the devils who enter in by legions and take possession of the empty minds of those who do nob create for themselves. You can see them in all their uncouth and horrible yet filmy shapes, some like grovelling swine, some like rapacious beasts and birds, with their bat-wings and combination of bestial forms covering the surface of the earth like a dense smoke all intertwined and loathsome to behold, as you can see the creation of purity, self-sacrifice and noble purpose fluttering like white doves and sea-birds in and out that black turgid cloud. These evil conceptions of past races covering the earth are the cause of man's blindness and inability to see beyond material objects, yet by prayer he can drive them back from him and force rends through that living veil, so that the doves may reach him, then for a moment he gets a glimpse of the Beyond before the moving mass of loathsomeness closes in again."

In this fashion Hesperia talked to them and revealed the mysteries of their new life, showing them that the earth was hell, and that man, not God, had created and peopled it, as disease is created from neglect, wilful ignorance and dirt, and which only man himself can abolish by strenuous and constant effort and prayer-sustained will-power.

"We can annihilate our own past creation of evil, and lessen this mighty mass of spectres who swarm together and haunt the earth, and that is our constant duty before we can ourselves rise above them, to pick out our own works and destroy them one by one where they are evil, and leave the good to live. In this way we weed out and keep down the evil swarm, otherwise