The High Plains
By high plains I do not mean table-lands; table-lands do not interest
one very much. They seem to involve the bore of a climb without
the pleasure of a peak. Also they arc vaguely associated with Asia
and those enormous armies that eat up everything like locusts,
as did the army of Xerxes; with emperors from nowhere spreading
their battalions everywhere; with the white elephants and the
painted horses, the dark engines and the dreadful mounted bowmen
of the moving empires of the East, with all that evil insolence
in short that rolled into Europe in the youth of Nero, and after
having been battered about and abandoned by one Christian nation
after another, turned up in England with Disraeli and was christened
(or rather paganed) Imperialism.
Also (it may be necessary to explain) I do not mean "high planes"
such as the Theosophists and the Higher Thought Centres talk about.
They spell theirs differently; but I will not have theirs
in any spelling. They, I know, are always expounding how this
or that person is on a lower plane, while they (the speakers)
are on a higher plane: sometimes they will almost tell you what plane,
as "5994" or "Plane F, sub-plane 304." I do not mean this sort
of height either. My religion says nothing about such planes except
that all men are on one plane and that by no means a high one.
There are saints indeed in my religion: but a saint only means
a man who really knows he is a sinner.
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