Chapter XXIII: Introduction (4)

"I have the gift of specialism," he replied. "Specialism constitutes a sort of inward vision which penetrates all things, and you can understand its processes only by a comparison. In the great cities of Europe, where works of art are produced by which the human hand endeavors to represent the effects of moral nature as well as those of physical nature, there are some sublime geniuses who express their ideas in marble. The sculptor works on the marble; he shapes it, and puts into it a world of thought. There are such marbles to which the hand of man has given the power of representing a wholly sublime or a wholly evil aspect of humanity; most beholders see in these a human figure and nothing more; others, a little higher in the scale of human beings, discern some part of the thoughts rendered by the sculptor, and admire the form; but those who are initiated into the secrets of Art are in sympathy with the sculptor; when they see his work they recognize in it the whole world of his thoughts. These are the princes of Art; they bear in themselves a mirror in which nature is reflected with all its most trifling details.

"Well, in me there is a mirror in which moral nature is reflected with all its causes and effects. I can read the past and the future by thus looking into the conscience. You still ask me how? Suppose the marble to be a man's body, and the sculptor to be feeling passion, vice, or crime, virtue, error, or repentance; then you will understand how I could read the stranger's soul, though you will not understand specialism; to imagine what that gift is you must possess it."

Though Wilfrid was akin to both the primitive and widely different types of men--men of might and men of mind--his excesses, his stormy life, and his sins had often shown him the way of faith; for doubt has two sides--the side of light and the side of darkness. Wilfrid had too thoroughly squeezed the world in both its aspects--matter and spirit--not to have felt the thirst of the unknown, the longing for the Beyond which comes to most men who have knowledge, power, and will. But neither his knowledge, nor his actions, nor his will had due guidance. He had escaped from social life from necessity, as a criminal flies to the cloister. Remorse, the virtue of the weak, could not touch him. Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong; it can end everything. But Wilfrid, in traveling through the world, which he had made his sanctuary, nowhere found balm for his wounds; nowhere had he found a nature to which he could attach himself. Despair had dried up in him the well-spring of desire. His was one of those spirits which, having come to a conflict with passion, have proved themselves the stronger, and so have nothing left to clutch in their talons; spirits which, the opportunity failing them for putting themselves at the head of their peers to trample a whole people under their horse's hoofs, would pay the price of a dreadful martyrdom for the gift of a faith to be wrecked upon; like lofty rocks waiting for the touch of a staff which never comes, to enable them to shed springs of running water.

Tossed among the snows of Norway by one of the purposes of his restless and inquiring life, the winter had taken him by surprise at Jarvis. On the day when he first saw Seraphita, the meeting wiped out all memories of his past life. This girl gave him such intense agitation as he had fancied was dead for ever. The ashes burst into flame again, and were blown away by the first breath of that voice. Who has known what it is to become young and pure again after growing cold with age and foul with impurities? Wilfrid loved suddenly, as he had never loved; he loved in secret, with faith and awe and hidden frenzies. His life was disturbed to its very source at the mere thought of seeing Seraphita. When he heard her speak, he was borne away to unknown worlds; he was dumb in her presence--she bewitched him.

Here, under the snows, amid the ice-fields, this heavenly flower had blossomed on the stem--the flower to which his hopes went up, till now deceived, whose mere presence gave rise to the new aspirations, the ideas, the feelings, that crowd around us to lift us up to higher realms, as angels transport the elect to heaven in the symbolical pictures suggested to painters by some familiar spirit. Celestial odors softened the granite of this rock, light endowed with language poured forth the divine melodies which escort the pilgrim on his way to heaven. Having drained the cup of earthly love and crushed it with his teeth, he now saw the cup of election, sparkling with limpid waters, the chalice that gives a thirst for unfading joys to all who approach it with lips of faith so ardent that the crystal does not break at their touch. He had met with the walls of brass he had been seeking throughout the world that he might climb them.

He flew to Seraphita, intending to express to her the vehemence of a passion under which he was plunging, like the horse in the story under the bronze rider whom nothing can move, who sits firm, and whose weight grows greater as the fiery steed tries to throw him. He went to tell her his life, to display the greatness of his soul by the greatness of his sins, to show her the ruins in his desert. But as soon as he had entered the precincts, and found himself in the vast domain surveyed by those eyes whose heavenly blue knew no limits in the present or in the past, he became as calm and submissive as a lion when, rushing on his prey in the African plain, he scents a love message on the wings of the breeze, and stands still. A gulf opened before him in which the words of his delirium were lost, and whence a voice came up that transformed him: he was a boy again, a boy of sixteen, shy and bashful before this maiden of the tranquil brow, this white creature whose immovable calm was like the stern impassibility of human justice. And the struggle had never ceased till this evening when, with a single look, she had at length stricken him down like a hawk, which, after describing bewildering spirals round its prey, makes it drop stunned before carrying it off to its eyrie.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

More than once had Seraphita chosen to show Wilfrid that she knew that motley inner part which forms the second life of most men. She had often said to him, in her dove-like tone, when Wilfrid had vowed on the way up that he would carry her off to be his own possession, "Why so much vehemence?" Wilfrid, when alone, was strong enough to utter the cry of rebellion he had given vent to at Pastor Becker's, to be soothed by the old man's narrative. This man--a mocker, a scorner--at last saw the light of a starlike belief rising in his darkness; he wondered whether Seraphita were not an exile from the upper spheres on her homeward road. He did not offer this Norwegian lily the homage of such idealization as lovers of every land are apt to squander; he really believed in her divinity.

Why was she buried in the depths of this fiord? What was she doing there? Unanswerable questions crowded on his mind. What could happen between him and her? What fate had led him hither?

To him Seraphita was the motionless statue, as light as a shade, that Minna had just seen standing on the brink of the abyss. Seraphita could thus confront every abyss, and nothing could hurt her; the line of her brow would be unmoved, the light in her eye would never tremble. His love, then, was without hope, but not without curiosity.

From the first moment when Wilfrid suspected the ethereal nature in this sorceress, who had told him the secret of his life in harmonious dreams, he resolved to try to subjugate her, to keep her, to steal her from heaven, where perhaps they awaited her. He would be the representative of humanity, of this earth, recapturing their prey. His pride, the only sentiment which can uplift a man for any length of time, would make him rejoice in that triumph for the rest of his life. At the mere thought his blood boiled in his veins, his heart swelled. If he could not succeed, he would crush her. It is so natural to destroy what you cannot get possession of, to deny what you do not understand, to insult what you covet.

Next day Wilfrid, full of the ideas to which the extraordinary spectacle he had witnessed had naturally given rise, wanted to cross-question David, and came to see him, making a pretext of his wish for news of Seraphita. Though Pastor Becker thought the poor old man was childish, the stranger trusted to his own perspicacity to guide him in discovering the grains of truth the old serving-man might drop in the torrent of his wandering talk.

David had the rigid but undecided expression of a man of eighty; under his white hair his brow showed deep wrinkles, forming broken stratifications, and his whole face was furrowed like the dry bed of a torrent. All his vitality seemed to be concentrated in his eyes, where a spark still gleamed; but that light even was hidden behind clouds, and might be either the fitful activity of a feeble mind, or the stupid glare of intoxication. His slow, heavy movements betrayed the chill of old age, and seemed to communicate it to any one who gazed at him for long, for he had the strength of inertia. His narrow intelligence awoke only at the sound of his mistress' voice, at the sight or the thought of her. She was the soul of this merely material wreck. When David was alone you would have thought him a corpse; if Seraphita appeared, or spoke, or was spoken of, the dead rose from the grave and recovered motion and speech.

Never were the dry bones that the breath of God shall revive in the valley of Jehoshaphat--never was that Apocalyptic parable more vividly realized than in this Lazarus perennially called forth from the sepulchre by the voice of this young girl. His mode of speech, always highly figurative, and often incomprehensible, kept the villagers from talking to him; but they greatly respected a mind so far removed from the vulgar routine; it commands the instinctive reverence of common folk.

Wilfrid found David in the outer room apparently asleep, close to the stove. Like a dog recognizing a friend's approach, the old man opened his eyes, saw the stranger, and did not stir.

"Well, where is she?" asked Wilfrid, sitting down by the old man.

David fluttered his fingers in the air to represent the flight of a bird.

"She is not still in pain?" asked Wilfrid.

"None but those beings who are plighted to heaven can suffer without any diminution of their love; that is the seal of true faith," said the old man gravely, like an instrument responding to a chance touch.

"Who tells you to say that?"

"The spirit."

"What happened, after all, last evening? Did you force your way past the Vertumni on guard? Did you steal in between the Mammons?"

"Yes," replied David, waking as if from a dream.

The mist before his eye cleared off under a flash that came from within, and which made it grow gradually as bright as an eagle's, as intelligent as a poet's.

"What then did you see?" asked Wilfrid, amazed at this sudden change.

"I saw Species and Shapes, I heard the Spirit of All Things; I saw the Rebellion of the Wicked, I listened to the words of the Good. Seven devils appeared, seven archangels came down to them. The archangels stood afar, they were veiled, and looked on. The devils were close at hand, they glittered and moved. Mammon was there in a shell of pearl, in the guise of a beautiful naked woman; his body was as dazzling as the snow, no human form can be so perfect; and he said, 'I am all pleasure, and thou shalt possess me!'--Lucifer, the Prince of Serpents, came in his royal attire; he was as a man, as beautiful as an angel, and he said, 'The human race shall serve thee!'--The Queen of the Covetous, she who never restores that which she has taken--the Sea herself appeared in her mantle of green; she opened her bosom and showed her store of gems, she vomited treasures and offered them as a gift; she tossed up waves of sapphire and emerald; her creatures were disturbed, they came forth from their hiding-places and spoke; the fairest of the pearls spread butterflies' wings, she listened, and spoke in sea-melodies, saying, 'We are both daughters of suffering, we are sisters; wait for me; we will fly together; I have only to be changed into a woman.' The bird that has the talons of an eagle and the legs of a lion, the head of a woman and a horse's quarters--the Animal--crouched before her and licked her feet, and promised seven hundred years of plenty to this well-beloved daughter.

"The most formidable of all, the Child, came to her very knee, weeping, and saying, 'Can you forsake me, so feeble and helpless? Mother, stay with me!' He played with the others, he shed idleness in the air; heaven itself might have yielded to his lament. The Virgin of pure song brought music that debauches the soul. The Kings of the East passed by with their slaves, their armies, and their women; the Wounded clamored for help, the Wretched held out their hands: 'Do not leave us, do not leave us!' was their cry.

"I too cried, 'Do not leave us; we will worship you--only stay!'

"Flowers burst from their seeds, and wrapped her in perfume, which said, 'Stay!' The Giant Anakim came down from Jupiter, bringing Gold and his comrades, and all the Spirits of the astral worlds who had followed him, and they all said, 'We will be thine for seven hundred years.' At last Death got off his pale horse and said, 'I will obey thee!' And they all fell on their faces at her feet; if you could but have seen them! They filled a vast plain, and all cried to her, 'We have fed thee; thou art our child; do not forsake us!'

"Life came up from the red waters and said, 'I will not desert thee!' Then, finding Seraphita speechless, she suddenly blazed like the sun, and exclaimed, 'I am the Light!'--'The light is there!' replied Seraphita, pointing to clouds where the archangels were astir. But she was worn out; Desire had broken her on the rack; she could only cry aloud, 'My God!'

"How many Angelic Spirits who have climbed the hill, and are on the point of reaching the summit, have stumbled on a stone that has made them fall and roll back into the depths!--All these fallen Spirits marveled at her constancy; they stood there a motionless chorus, weeping, and saying, 'Courage!' At last she had triumphed over Desire, unchained to rend her in every Shape and Species. She remained praying; and when she raised her eyes, she saw the feet of the angels flying back to heaven."

"She saw the feet of the angels?" repeated Wilfrid.

"Yes," said the old man.

"This was a dream that she told you?" asked Wilfrid.

"A dream as real as that you are alive," replied David. "I was there."

The old servant's calm conviction struck Wilfrid, who went away, wondering whether these visions were at all less extraordinary than those of which Swedenborg wrote, and of which he had read the evening before.

"If spirits exist, they must surely act," said he to himself as he went into the manse, where he found the pastor alone.

"My dear pastor," said he, "Seraphita is human only in form, and her form is unaccountable. Do not regard me as mad or in love: conviction cannot be argued away. Convert my belief into a scientific hypothesis, and let us try to understand all this. To-morrow we will go to see her together."

"And then?" said the minister.

"If her eye knows no limitation of space, if her thought is the sight of the intellect, allowing her to apprehend the essence of things and to connect them with the general evolution of the universe; if, in a word, she knows and sees everything, let us get the Pythoness onto her tripod, and compel the eagle to spread its wings, by threats. Help me! I breathe a consuming fire; I must extinguish it, or be devoured by it. In short, I see my prey; I will have it."

"It will be a conquest difficult of achievement," said the minister, "for the poor girl is----"

"Is?"----said Wilfrid.

"Mad," said the pastor.

"I will not dispute her madness," said Wilfrid, "so long as you do not dispute her superiority. Dear Pastor Becker, she has often put me to the blush by her learning. Has she traveled much?"

"From her house to the fiord."

"She has never been away!" cried Wilfrid. "Then she must have read a great deal?"

"Not a page, not a jot. I am the only person in Jarvis who has any books. Swedenborg's writings, the only works in the hamlet, are here; she has never borrowed a single volume."

"Have you ever tried to converse with her?"

"Of what use would it be?"

"No one has dwelt under her roof?"

"She has no friends but you and Minna; no servant but old David."

"And she has never learned anything of Science or Art?"

"From whom?" said the pastor.

"Then, when she discusses such matters very pertinently, as she has often done with me, what would you infer?"

"That the girl may, perhaps, during all these years of silence, have acquired such faculties as were possessed by Apollonius of Tyana, and by certain so-called wizards, who were burned by the Inquisition, which rejected the idea of second sight."

"When she talks Arabic, what can you say?"

"The history of medicine contains many accredited instances of women who spoke languages they did not understand."

"What can I do?" said Wilfrid. "She knows things concerning my past life of which the secret lay in me."

"We will see if she can tell me any thoughts that I have never spoken to any one," said Pastor Becker.

Minna came into the room.

"Well, my child, and how is your Spirit-friend?"

"He is suffering, father," said she, bowing to Wilfrid. "The passions of humanity, tricked out in their false splendor, tortured him in the night, and spread incredible pomp before his eyes.--But you treat all these things as mere fables."

"Fables as delightful to him who reads them in his brain as those of the _Arabian Nights_ are to ordinary minds," said her father, smiling.

"Then, did not Satan," she retorted, "transport the Saviour to the summit of the Temple and show Him the kingdoms at His feet?"

"The Evangelists," replied Becker, "did not so effectually correct their text but that several versions exist."

"You, then, believe in the reality of these apparitions?" Wilfrid asked of Minna.

"Who can doubt that hears him tell of them?"

"Him?--Who?" asked Wilfrid.

"He who dwells there," said Minna, pointing to the castle.

"You speak of Seraphita?" said Wilfrid, surprised.

The girl hung her head, with a gentle but mischievous glance at him.

"Yes, you too take pleasure in confusing my mind.--Who is she? What is your idea of her?"

"What I feel is inexplicable," said Minna, coloring.

"You are both mad!" said the pastor.

"Then we meet to-morrow," said Wilfrid, as he left.

IV

THE CLOUDS OF THE SANCTUARY

There are spectacles to which all the material magnificence at man's command is made to contribute. Whole tribes of slaves or divers go forth to seek in the sands of the sea, in the bowels of the rocks, the pearls and diamonds that adorn the spectators. These treasures, handed down from heir to heir, have blazed on crowned heads, and might be the most veracious historians of humanity if they could but speak. Have they not seen the joys and woes of the greatest as well as of the humblest? They have been everywhere--worn with pride at high festivals; carried in despair to the money-lender; stolen amid blood and pillage; treasured in miracles of artistic workmanship contrived for their safe keeping. Excepting Cleopatra's pearl, not one has perished.

The great and the rich are assembled to see a king crowned--a monarch whose raiment is the work of men's hands, but who, in all his glory, is arrayed in purple less exquisite than that of a humble flower. These festivities, blazing with light, bathed in music through which the words of men strive to be heard in thunder,--all these works of man can be crushed by a thought, a feeling. The mind of man can bring to his ken light more glorious, can make him hear more tuneful harmonies, show him among clouds the glittering constellations he may question; and the heart can do yet more! Man may stand face to face with a single being and find in a single word, a single look, a burden so heavy to be borne, a light so intense, a sound so piercing, that he can but yield and kneel. The truest splendors are not in outward things, but in ourselves.

To a learned man, is not some secret of science a whole new world of wonders? But do the clarions of force, the gems of wealth, the music of triumph, the concourse of the crowd, do honor to his joy? No. He goes off to some remote nook, where a man, often pale and feeble, whispers a single word in his ear. That word, like a torch in an underground passage, lights up the whole of science.

Every human conception, arrayed in the most attractive forms that mystery can invent, once gathered round a blind man sitting in the mud by a roadside. The three worlds--the Natural, Spiritual, and Divine--were revealed to an unhappy Florentine exile; as he went he was escorted by the happy and by the suffering, by those who prayed and those who cursed, by angels and by the damned. When He who came from God, who knew and could do all things, appeared to three of His disciples, it was one evening at the common table of a poor little inn; there and then the Light broke forth, bursting material husks, and showing its spiritual power. They saw Him in His glory, and the earth clung to their feet no more than as the sandals they could slip off them.

The pastor, Wilfrid, and Minna were all three excited to alarm at going to the house of the extraordinary being they proposed to question. To each of them the Swedish castle was magnified into the scene of a stupendous spectacle, like those of which the composition and color are so skilfully arranged by poets, where the actors, though imaginary to men, are real to those who are beginning to enter into the spiritual world. On the seats of that amphitheatre the pastor beheld arrayed the dark legions of doubt, his gloomy ideas, his vicious syllogisms in argument; he called up the various philosophical and religious sects, ever contentious, and all embodied in the shape of a fleshless system, as lean as the figure of Time as imagined by man--the old mower who with one hand raises the scythe, and in the other carries a meagre world, the world of human life.

Wilfrid saw there his first illusions and his last hopes; he imagined human destiny incarnate there and all its struggles; religion and its triumphant hierarchies.

Minna vaguely found heaven there, seen through a vista; love held up a curtain embroidered with mystical figures, and the harmonious sounds that fell on her ears increased her curiosity. Hence this evening was to them what the supper at Emmaus was to the three travelers, what a vision was to Dante, what an inspiration was to Homer; to them, too, the three aspects of the world were to be revealed, veils rent, doubts dispelled, darkness lightened. Human nature in all its phases, and awaiting illumination, could find no better representatives than this young girl, this man, and these two elders, one of them learned enough to be sceptical, the other ignorant enough to believe. No scene could be simpler in appearance or more stupendous in fact.

On entering, shown in by old David, they found Seraphita standing by the table, on which were spread the various items constituting a Tea, a meal which takes the place in the north of the pleasures of wine-drinking, reserved for southern lands. Nothing certainly betrayed in her--or in him--a wondrous being who had the power of appearing under two distinct forms, nothing that showed the various forces she could command. With a homely desire to make her three guests comfortable, Seraphita bid David to feed the stove with wood.

"Good-evening, neighbors," said she. "Dear Pastor Becker, you did well to come; you see me alive, perhaps, for the last time. This winter has killed me.--Be seated, pray," she added to Wilfrid.--"And you, Minna, sit there," and she pointed to an armchair near the young man. "You have brought your work, I see. Did you find out the stitch? The pattern is very pretty. For whom is it to be? For your father or for this gentleman?" and she turned to Wilfrid. "We must not allow him to leave without some remembrance of the damsels of Norway."

"Then you were in pain again yesterday?" asked Wilfrid.

"That is nothing," she replied. "Such pain makes me glad; it is indispensable to escape from life."

"Then you are not afraid of dying?" said the minister, smiling, for he did not believe in her illness.

"No, dear pastor; there are two ways of dying--to some death means victory, to some it is defeat."

"And you think you have won?" said Minna.

"I do not know," said she. "Perhaps it is only a step more."

The milky radiance of her brow seemed to fade, her eyes fell under her lids, which slowly closed. This simple circumstance distressed the three inquirers, who sat quite still. The pastor was the boldest.

"My dear girl," said he, "you are candor itself; you are also divinely kind. I want more of you this evening than the dainties of your tea-table. If we may believe what some people say, you know some most wonderful things; and if so, would it not be an act of charity to clear up some of our doubts?"

"Oh yes!" said Seraphita, with a smile. "They say that I walk on the clouds; I am on familiar terms with the eddies in the fiord; the sea is a horse I have saddled and bridled; I know where the singing flower grows, where the talking light shines, where living colors blaze that scent the air; I have Solomon's ring; I am a fairy; I give my orders to the wind, and it obeys me like a submissive slave; I can see the treasures in the mine; I am the virgin whom pearls rush to meet, and----"

"And we walk unharmed on the Falberg," Minna put in.

"What, you too?" replied the Being with a luminous glance at the girl, which quite upset her. "If I had not the power of reading through your brows the wish that has brought you here, should I be what you think I am?" she went on, including them all in her captivating gaze, to David's great satisfaction, and he went off rubbing his hands.--"Yes," she went on after a pause, "you all came overflowing with childish curiosity. You, my dear pastor, wondered whether it were possible that a girl of seventeen should know even one of the thousand secrets which learned men seek diligently with their noses to the ground instead of with their eyes raised to heaven! Now, if I were to show you how and where plant life and animal life mingle, you would begin to doubt your doubts.--You plotted to cross-question me, confess?"

"Yes, beloved Seraphita," said Wilfrid. "But is not such a desire natural to man?"

"And do you want to worry this child?" she said, laying her hand on Minna's hair with a caressing gesture.

The girl looked up, and seemed to long to be merged in the Being before her.

"The word is given for all," the mysterious Being went on very gravely. "Woe to him who should keep silence even in the midst of the desert, thinking that none would hear. Everything speaks, everything hears here below. The word moves worlds.--I hope, Pastor Becker, not to speak in vain. I know what difficulties trouble you most: would it not be a miracle if I could at once apprehend all the past experiences of your conscience? Well, that miracle will be accomplished.--Listen to me: you have never confessed your doubts in their full extent; I alone, immovable in my faith, can set them before you, and frighten you at your own image. You are on the darkest declivity of doubt. You do not believe in God, and everything on earth is of secondary importance to the man who attacks the first cause of everything.

"Let us set aside the discussions thrashed out without result by false philosophers. Generations of Spiritualists have made no less vain efforts to disprove the existence of matter than generations of Materialists have made to disprove the existence of the Spirit. Why these contests? Does not man, as he is, afford undeniable proofs of both? Is he not an union of matter and spirit? Only a madman can refuse to find an atom of matter in the human frame; when it is decomposed, natural science finds no difference between its elements and those of other animals. The idea which is produced in man by the power of comparing several different objects, on the other hand, does not seem to come within the domain of matter. On this I give no opinion; we have to deal with your doubts, not with my convictions.

"But to you, as to most thoughtful men, the relations which you have the faculty of discerning between things, of which the real existence is made certain to you through your senses, do not, I suppose, seem _material_. The natural Universe, then, of things and beings meets in man with the supernatural Universe of likeness or difference which he can discern between the innumerable forms in nature--relations so various that they seem to be infinite; for if, till the present day, no one has been able to enumerate the created things of this earth only, what man can ever enumerate their relations to each other? Is not the small fraction with which you are familiar, in regard to the grand total, as an unit to the infinite?

"Hence here you find yourself already made aware of the existence of the infinite, and this necessarily leads you to conceive of a purely spiritual sphere. Hence, too, man is in himself sufficient evidence of these two modes of life: Matter and Spirit. In him ends a finite, visible universe; in him begins an infinite and invisible universe--two worlds that do not know each other. Have the pebbles of the fiord any cognizance of their relative shapes, are they conscious of the colors seen in them by the eye of man, do they hear the music of the ripples that dance over them? Let us then leap the gulf we cannot fathom, the unthinkable union of a material with a spiritual universe, the concept of a visible, ponderable, tangible creation, conterminous with an invisible, imponderable, intangible creation; absolutely dissimilar, separated by a void, united by indisputable points of contact, and meeting in a being who belongs to both! Let us, I say, mingle in one world these two worlds, which, in your philosophy, can never coalesce, and which, in fact, do coalesce.

"However abstract man may call it, the relation which binds two things together must stamp its mark. Where? On what? We have not now to inquire to what degree of rarity matter may be reduced. If that were indeed the question, I do not see why He who has linked the stars together at immeasurable distances by physical laws, to veil His face withal, should not have created substances that could think, nor why you will not allow that He should have given thought a body.

"To you, then, your invisible, moral, or mental universe, and your visible, physical universe, constitute one and the same matter. We will not divide bodies from their properties, nor objects from their relations. Everything that exists, that weighs upon and overwhelms us from above and beneath us, before us or within us; all that our eyes or our minds apprehend, all that is named or nameless, must, to reduce the problem of Creation to the standard of your logic, be a finite mass of matter; if it were infinite, God could not be its master. Thus, according to you, dear pastor, by whatever scheme you propose to introduce God, who is infinite, into this finite mass of matter, God could no longer exist with such attributes as are ascribed to Him by man. If we seek Him through facts, He is not; if we seek Him through reason, still He is not; both spiritually and materially God is impossible. Let us hearken to the word of human reason driven to its utmost consequences.

"If we now conceive of God face to face with, this stupendous whole, we find only two conditions of relationship possible: Either God and Matter were contemporaneous, or God was alone and pre-existent. If all the wisdom that has enlightened the human race from the first day of its existence could be collected in one vast brain, that monstrous brain could invent no third mode of being, short of denying both God and Matter. Human philosophers may pile up mountains of words and ideas. Religions may accumulate emblems and beliefs, revelations and mysteries, still we are forced on to this terrible dilemma, and must choose one of the two propositions it offers. However, you have not much choice, for each leads the human mind to scepticism.

"The problem being thus stated, what signifies Spirit or Matter? What does it signify which way the worlds are moving if once the Being who guides them is proved to be absurd? Of what use is it to inquire whether man is advancing towards heaven or coming back from it, whether Creation is tending upwards towards the spirit, or downwards towards matter, if the worlds we question can give no answer? Of what consequence are theogonies and their armies, theologies and their dogmas, when, whichever alternative man chooses in answer to the problem, his God is no more?

"Let us examine the first: Suppose God and matter to have been co-existent from the beginning. Can He be God who suffers the action and co-existence of a substance that is not Himself? On this theory God is but a secondary agent constrained to organize matter. Who constrained Him? And as between that coarser other half and Him, who was to decide? Who paid the Great Workman for the six days' labor attributed to Him? If there were, indeed, some coercing force which was neither God nor matter, if God were compelled to make the machinery of the universe, it would be no less absurd to call Him God than to call a slave set to turn a mill a Roman citizen. And, in fact, the difficulty is just as insoluble in the case of that Supreme Intelligence as in that of God Himself. It only carries the problem a step further back; and is not this like the Indian philosophers, who place the world on a tortoise, and the tortoise on an elephant, but cannot say on what their elephant's feet rest? Can we conceive that this Supreme Will, evolved from the conflict of God with matter--this God greater than God--should have existed during eternity without Willing what He Willed, granting that eternity can be divided into two periods? Wherever God may be, if He knew not what His future Will would be, what becomes of His intuitive perceptions? And of these two eternities, which is the superior--uncreated eternity or created eternity?

"If God from all eternity willed that the world should be what it is, this fresh view of necessity, which is in harmony no doubt with the motion of a Sovereign Intelligence, implies the co-eternity of matter. Whether matter be co-eternal by the Divine Will, which must at all times be at one with itself, or whether it be independently co-eternal, since the power of God must be absolute, it perishes if He has not His freewill. He would always have found within Himself a supreme reason which would have ruled Him. Is God God if He cannot separate Himself from the works of His creation in subsequent as well as in anterior eternity?

"This aspect of the problem is then insoluble so far as cause is concerned. Let us examine it in its effects.

"If God the Creator, under compulsion to create the universe from all eternity, is inconceivable, He is no less so as perpetually one with His work. God, eternally constrained to exist in His creatures, is no less dishonored than in His former position as a workman. Can you conceive of a God who can no more be independent of His work than dependent on it? Can He destroy it without treason to Himself? Consider and make your choice: Whether He should some day destroy it, or not destroy it; either alternative is equally fatal to attributes, without which He cannot subsist. Is the world a mere experiment, a perishable mould which must be destroyed? Then God must be inconsistent and impotent. Inconsistent--for ought He not to have known the issue before making the experiment, and why does He delay destroying that which is to be destroyed? Impotent--or how else could He have created an imperfect world?

"And if an imperfect creation belies the faculties that man ascribes to God, let us, on the other hand, suppose it to be perfect. This idea is in harmony with our conception of a God of supreme intelligence who could make no mistake; but, then, why any deterioration? Why Regeneration? Then a perfect world is necessarily indestructible, its forms must be imperishable; it can neither advance nor retrocede; it rolls on in an eternal orbit whence it can never deviate. Thus is God dependent on His work; thus it is co-eternal with Him, which brings us back to one of the propositions which most audaciously attacks God. If the universe is imperfect, it allows of advance and progress; if perfect, it is stationary. If it is impossible to conceive of a progressive God, not knowing from all eternity what the result would be of His creation, can we then admit a stationary God? Would not that be the apotheosis of matter, the greatest possible negation? Under the first hypothesis, God deceases by want of power; under the second, He deceases by the force of inertia.

"Hence, alike in the conception and the execution of creation, to every honest mind the notion of matter as contemporaneous with God is a denial of God.

"Compelled to choose between these two aspects of the question, in order to govern the nations, many generations of great thinkers have chosen the second. This gave rise to the dogma of two moral elements, as conceived of by the Magians, which has spread in Europe under the image of Satan contending with the Father of all. But are not this dogmatic formula and the endless deifications that are derived from it crimes of high treason to the divine Majesty? By what other name can we call a belief that makes the personification of Evil the rival of God, for ever struggling in the throes of a supreme intellect without any hope of victory? The laws of statics show that two forces thus placed must neutralize each other.

"Now, turn to the other side of the problem: God was pre-existent and alone.

"We need not reproduce the former arguments, which are equally strong in relation to the division of eternity into two periods--uncreated and created. We will also set aside the question of the motion or the immobility of worlds, and restrict ourselves to the inherent difficulties of this second thesis.

"If God pre-existed alone, the universe proceeded from Him; matter is the emanation of His essence. Then matter is not. Every form is but a veil hiding the Divine Spirit. Then, the world is eternal; then, the world is God! But is not this formula even more fatal than the former one to the attributes assigned to God by human reason? Does matter, as emanating from God, and always one with Him, account for the existing conditions of matter? How are we to believe that the Almighty, supremely good in His nature and His acts, could beget things so unlike Himself that He is not in all things and everywhere the same? Were there in Him certain evil constituents which He rejected from Him?--A conjecture more terrible than offensive or ridiculous, inasmuch as it includes the two theorems which, in our former argument, we proved to be inadmissible. God must be One, and cannot divide Himself without infringing the most important of His attributes. Is it possible to conceive of a portion of God which is not God?

"This hypothesis seemed so impious to the Roman Church, that she made God's Omnipresence, even in the smallest fragments of the Eucharist, an article of Faith.

"How, then, are we to conceive of an Omnipotent Intelligence which yet cannot conquer? How unite it with Nature, unless by direct conquest? But Nature seeks and combines, reproduces, dies, and is born again; it is even more agitated in the creative effort than when all is in a state of fusion; it suffers and groans; it is ignorant, degenerate, does evil, makes mistakes, destroys itself, disappears, and begins again. How are we to justify the almost universal eclipse of the Divine element? Why is Death? Why was the spirit of evil, the monarch of this earth, sent forth from a supremely good God--good alike in His essence and His faculties, who could have produced nothing that was not like Himself?

"And if, setting aside this relentless issue which leads us at once to the absurd, we go into details, what purpose can we ascribe to the world? If all is God, all is at once effect and cause; or, more accurately, cause and effect do not exist. Like God, all is one; and you can discern no starting-point and no end. Can the real end be, possibly, a rotation of matter growing more and more rare? But whatever the end may be, is not the mechanism of such matter proceeding from God and returning to God, a mere child's plaything? Why should He embody Himself so grossly? Under what form is God most completely God? Which wins the day, spirit or matter, when neither of those modes of being can be wrong? Who can possibly discern God in this perennial toil by which He divides Himself into two natures--one omniscient, the other knowing nothing? Can you conceive of God as playing at being man, laughing His own labors to scorn, dying on Friday to rise again on Sunday, and carrying on the farce from age to age while knowing the end from all eternity; and never telling Himself, the Creature, what He is doing as Creator?

"The God of the former hypothesis, null as He is by sheer inertia, seems more possible--if we had to choose between impossibilities--than that stupid mocking God who destroys Himself when two portions of humanity meet weapon in hand. Comical as this ultimate expression of the second aspect of the problem may be, it was that chosen by half the human race among nations that had created certain gay mythologies. These amorous nations were consistent; to them everything was a God, even fear and its cowardice, even crime and its bacchanals. If we accept Pantheism, the faith of some great human geniuses, who can tell where reason lies? Is it with the savage running free in the desert, clothed in his nakedness, lordly and always right in his actions whatever they may be, listening to the sun and talking to the sea? Is it with the civilized man, whose greatest pleasures are due to falsehoods, who hews and hammers Nature to make the gun he carries on his shoulder, who has applied his intelligence to hasten the hour of his death, and create maladies that taint his pleasures? When the scourge of pestilence, or the ploughshare of war, or the genius of the desert had passed over a spot of earth, annihilating everything, which came off best--the Nubian savage or the patrician of Thebes?

"Your scepticism permeates from above downwards. Your doubts include everything, the end as well as the means. If the physical world seems inexplicable, the moral world proves even more against God. Where, then, is progress? If everything goes on improving, why do we die as children? Why do not nations, at any rate, perpetuate themselves? Is the world that proceeded from God, that is contained in God, stationary? Do we live but once? Or do we live for ever? If we live but once, coerced by the advance of the Great All, of which we have no knowledge given us, let us do what we will! If we are eternal, let everything pass! Can the creature be guilty because it exists when changes are going on? If it sins at the moment of some great transformation, shall it be punished for it after having been the victim? What becomes of divine goodness if it refuses to place us at once in the realms of happiness--if such there be? What becomes of God's foreknowledge if He does not know the results of the trials to which He subjects us? What is this alternative proposed to man by all His creeds, between stewing in an eternal caldron and wandering in a white robe with a palm in his hand and a halo to crown him? Can this pagan invention be the supreme promise of God?

"And what magnanimous spirit but sees how unworthy of man and God alike is virtue out of self-interest, the eternity of joys offered by every creed to those who, during a few brief hours of existence, fulfil certain monstrous and often unnatural conditions? Is it not preposterous to endow man with vehement senses and then forbid his gratifying them?

"Besides, to what end these trivial objections when good and evil alike are negatived? Does evil exist? If matter in all its manifestations is evil, evil is God.

"The faculty of reason, as well as the faculty of feeling, being bestowed on man for his use, nothing can be more pardonable than to seek a meaning in human suffering and to inquire into the future; if this rigid and rigorous logic leads us to such conclusions, what confusion is here! The world has then no stability; nothing moves on, and nothing stands still; everything changes, but nothing is destroyed; everything renews itself and reappears; for, if your mind cannot unanswerably prove an end, it is equally impossible to prove the annihilation of the smallest atom of matter: it may be transformed, but not destroyed. Though blind force may prove the atheist's position, intelligent force is inscrutable; for, if it proceeds from God, ought it to encounter any obstacles; ought it not to conquer them immediately?

"Where is God? If the living are not aware of Him, will the dead find Him?

"Crumble into dust, O idolatries and creeds! Fall, O too feeble keystones of the social arches, for ye have never retarded the destruction, the death, the oblivion, that have come upon all the nations of the past, however securely they were founded. Fall, O morality and justice! Our crimes are but relative, they are divine results of which the causes are unknown to us! Everything is God. Either we are God, or God is not! Child of an age of which each year has left on your brow the cold touch of its scepticism--Old Man! this is the sum total of your science and your long meditations!

"Dear Pastor Becker, you have rested your head on the pillow of doubt, finding it the easiest solution, acting indeed like the majority of the human race. They say to themselves, 'We will think no more of this question if God will not vouchsafe us an algebraic demonstration for its solution, while He has given us so many that lead us safely up from the earth to the stars----'

"Now, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I missed them? Have I not, on the contrary, precisely stated them?--Either the dogma of the two elementary principles, an antagonism in which God is destroyed by the very fact that He--who is Almighty--plays at a struggle; or the ridiculous Pantheism in which all things being God, God is no more--these two founts, whence flow the creeds to whose triumph the earth is devoted, are equally pernicious.

"There, between us, lies the two-edged axe with which you behead the white-haired Ancient of Days whom you enthrone on painted clouds!

"Now, give me the axe!"

The pastor and Wilfrid looked at the girl in a sort of dismay.

"Belief," said Seraphita in her gentle voice--for the man had been speaking hitherto--"belief is a gift! Belief is feeling. To believe in God, you must feel God. This sense is a faculty slowly acquired by the human being, as those wonderful powers are acquired which you admire in great men--in warriors, artists, men of science--those who act, those who produce, those who know. Thought, a bundle of the relations which you discern between different things, is an intellectual language that may be learned, is it not? Belief, a bundle of heavenly truths, is in the same way a language, but as far above thought as thought is above instinct. This language too can be learned.

"The believer answers in a single cry, a single sign; faith places in his hand a flaming sword which cuts and throws light on everything. The seer does not come down again from heaven; he contemplates it and is silent. There is a being who both believes and sees, who has knowledge and power, who loves, prays, and waits. That being is resigned, and aspires to the realm of light; he has neither the believer's lofty scorn, nor the Seer's dumbness; he both listens and replies. To him the doubt of the dark ages is not a lethal weapon, but a guiding clue; he accepts the battle in whatever guise; he can accommodate his tongue to every language; he is never wroth, he pities; he neither condemns nor kills, he redeems and comforts; he has not the harshness of an aggressor, but rather the mild fluidity of light which penetrates and warms and lights up every place. In his eyes scepticism is not impiety, is not blasphemy, is not a crime; it is a stage of transition whence a man must go forward towards the light, or back into the darkness.

"So now, dear Pastor, let us reason together. You do not believe in God. Why?--God, as you express it, is incomprehensible and inexplicable. I grant it. I will not retort that to comprehend God altogether is to be God. I will not tell you that you deny what you think inexplicable simply to give myself a right of affirming what seems to me believable. To you there is an evident fact dwelling within you. In you matter is conterminous with intelligence; and yet you think that human intelligence will end in darkness, in doubt, in nothingness? Even if God seems to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, confess at least that in all physical phenomena you recognize in Him a consistent and exquisite Craftsman.

"Then why should His logic end at man, as His most finished work? Though the question may not be convincing, it deserves some consideration at any rate. Though you deny God, to give a basis to your doubts, you happily can appreciate certain double-edged truths which demolish your arguments as effectually as your arguments demolish God.