By our true wishes we
divine our destiny.
Yes, even long ago I wished, and to-day I am still on the way, though
I have actually pilgrimaged to Jerusalem in Palestine. My pilgrimage
was a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage. It was the drawing of a picture
on earth of a journey in heaven. As a day is to a year, and as a year
to man's life, so is man's life to that which we do not know, the
course of our life beyond Time's blank horizon. If I have often
stopped to tell of a little day, or a little hour in the day, it
is because I sought there a picture of Eternity, of the whole
significance of the pilgrimage.
I suppose I did not know that when I first left England to go to
Russia I was turning my face toward Jerusalem. Yet it was so. For I
should never have gone direct from London to the Holy Land. If I had
attempted such a journey I should probably have failed to reach the
great Shrine, for it is only a certain sort of people travelling in a
certain sort of way who find admittance easily. By the Russian peasant
I was enabled to go. It is strange to think that even when I was
journeying northward to Archangel I was winding my way Jerusalem-ward
in the sacred labyrinth. And I could not have gone straight southward
with the pilgrims without wandering in contrary directions first of
all, for it was necessary to come into sympathy and union with the
peasant soul.
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