The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES The tuba tree will make, with its back-curving branches, a dais for the celestial table. The bride will be white as the moon, and scarlet as the smile of morning. All nations shall press forward to see her, and they will no longer fear to pass Al Sirah; for, on that razor-edged bridge, the Saviour will stretch His cross, and come to stretch His hand to those who stumble, and to those who have fallen the bride will stretch her perfumed veil, and draw them to her. O ye people, clap your hands, and praise the last triumph of love! Death alone will remain dead, and hell alone will be consumed! O nations of Europe, to whom the East stretches forth its hands, unite and push back the northern bear! Let the last war bring the triumph of intelligence and love, let commerce interlace the arms of the world, and a new civilization, sprung from the armed Gospel, unite all the flocks of the earth under the crook of the:same shepherd! Such will be the conquests of progress, such is the end to- wards which the whole movement of the world is pushing us. Progress is movement, and movement is life. To deny progress is to affirm nothingness, and to deify death. Progress is the only reply that reason can give to the objections which the existence of evil raises. 1 Written about the time of the Crimean War, this indicates Levi’s attempt to use Imperialism as his magical weapon, just as Allan Bennett tried to use Buddhism. All these second-hand swords break, as Wagner saw when he wrote Siegfried, and invented a new Music, a Nothung which has shorn asunder more false sceptres than Wotan’s.—O. M. 55