18 INVISIBLE HELPERS

In this instance there seems no reason to doubt
that the mother herself was still keeping a loving
watch over her children from the astral^la^e, and
that (as has happened in some other cases) her in-
tense desire to warn them of the danger into which
they were so heedlessly rushing gave her the power
to make herself visible and audible to them for
the moment—or perhaps merely to impress their
minds with the idea that they saw and heard her-
It is possible, of course, that the helper may have
been someone else, who took the familiar form of the
mother in order not to alarm the children; but the
simplest hypothesis is to attribute the intervention
to the action of the ever-wakeful mother-love itself,
undimmed by the passage through the gates of
•death.

This mother-love, being one of the holiest and
most unselfish of human feelings, is also one of the
most persistent on higher planes. Not only does
the mother who finds herself upon the lower levels
of the astral plane, and consequently still within
touch of the earth, maintain her interest in and her
care for her children as long as she is able to see
them; even after her entry into the heaven-world
these little ones are still the most prominent objects
in her thought, and the wealth of love that she
lavishes upon the images which she there makes
of them is a great outpouring of spiritual force