Looking back upon my experience, I cannot doubt that I--with many others--was destined to this phase of development, and designed for this peculiar work, before I knew conscious being. My brain was fashioned, and my nervous system finely strung, so that I should inevitably catch the thrill of the innumerable voices resounding through the universe, and translate their messages into human language, as coherently and clearly as my imperfections would allow. The early influences of my childhood, the experiences of later years, and more than all, that unutterable yearning for Beauty and Harmony, which I felt dimly conscious was somewhere in the universe, all tended to drive me back from the world, which would not and could not give me what I asked, to the revelations of my inner life,--to the “Heaven within me.” It was only through the cultivation of my spiritual nature that “spiritual things were to be discerned,” and the stern necessity of my life was the Teacher which finally educated me into the perception of Truth.
I turn back to the memories of my childhood--to that long course of trying experiences through which I passed, guided by strange and invisible influences; and that whole course of discipline has for me now a peculiar significance. Those who were near and dear to me, and who were most familiar with my habits of life, knew little of my intense spiritual experience. I was too much afraid of being ridiculed and misunderstood to dare give any expression to the strange and indefinable emotions within me. Such ones, however, may call to mind the child who often, through the long winter evenings, sat in profound silence by the fireside, with her head and face enveloped in her apron, to exclude, as far as possible, all external sight and sound. What I heard and saw then but dimly returns to me; but even then the revelations from the “Heaven within” had commenced, and succeeding years have so strengthened and confirmed my vision, that such scenes have become to me living truths and blessed realities. The “Heaven” that “lay about me in my infancy” sent its rich glow through my childhood, and sheds its mystic brightness upon the pathway of my riper years.