At The Gate of Death
by Katharine Hillard
(Theosophical Quarterly, July 1908, Vol. 6; pp.56-59)
One of the most interesting signs of the times is the increasing tendency of conservative thinkers to feel their way cautiously into what seems to them a novel line of thought, but which to those accustomed to theosophical teachings, appears to be a very slight deviation from the ordinary conceptions of life and death. It is nevertheless always an advantage to see what we call truth, and perhaps even self-evident truth, put in a new and tentative form, so that we suddenly awake to the perception of possible outlines that we had never seen before, as when a much-belated spring like the present gives one glimpse of rugged mountain sides and abrupt cliffs through the delicate tracery of the half-opened leaves, that had been hidden in other years by the luxuriant foliage of summer.
The more Mr. Arthur Benson writes, the closer he seems to come to theosophical ideas without actually expressing them, so that he reminds one of the blind man in a game of blind-man’s bluff, who comes straight toward one for a breathless instant, and when just within touching distance suddenly dashes off to the other side of the room, quite unconscious that a captive was so nearly within his grasp.
Mr. Benson’s recently published book (by G.P. Putnam’s Sons) is in the form of a diary, and is founded on an experience—not so rare perhaps as the author seems to think—of two returns from the very gate of death. The first time it was an accident, a fall from a tree, that brought him almost within the dark portals, and some months afterwards an attack of pneumonia and heart failure very nearly swept him once more out of our world.
