THE old priest was silent for a moment.
The song of a great bee boomed up out of the distance and ceased as the
white bell of a flower beside me drooped suddenly under his weight.
“I have not made myself clear,” said the priest again. “Let me think a
minute.” And he leaned back.
We were sitting on a little red-tiled platform in his garden, in a
sheltered angle of the wall. On one side of us rose the old irregular
house, with its latticed windows, and its lichened roofs culminating in
a bellturret; on the other I looked across the pleasant garden where
great scarlet poppies hung like motionless flames in the hot June
sunshine, to the tall living wall of yew, beyond which rose the heavy
green masses of an elm in which a pigeon lamented, and above all a
tender blue sky. The priest was looking out steadily before him with
great childlike eyes that shone strangely in his thin face under his
white hair. He was dressed in an old cassock that showed worn and green
in the high lights.
“No,” he said presently, “it is not faith that I mean; it is only an
intense form of the gift of spiritual perception that God has given me;
which gift indeed is common to us all in our measure. It is the faculty
by which we verify for ourselves what we have received on authority and
hold by faith. Spiritual life consists partly in exercising this
faculty. Well, then, this form of that faculty God has been pleased to
bestow upon me, just as He has been pleased to bestow on you a keen
power of seeing and enjoying beauty where others perhaps see none; this
is called artistic perception. It is no sort of credit to you or to me,
any more than is the colour of our eyes, or a faculty for mathematics,
or an athletic body.
“Now in my case, in which you are pleased to be interested, the
perception occasionally is so keen that the spiritual world appears to
me as visible as what we call the natural world. In such moments,
although I generally know the difference between the spiritual and the
natural, yet they appear to me simultaneously, as if on the same plane.
It depends on my choice as to which of the two I see the more clearly.
“Let me explain a little. It is a question of focus. A few minutes ago
you were staring at the sky, but you did not see the sky. Your own
thought lay before you instead. Then I spoke to you, and you started a
little and looked at me; and you saw me, and your thought vanished. Now
can you understand me if I say that these sudden glimpses that God has
granted me, were as though when you looked at the sky, you saw both the
sky and your thought at once, on the same plane, as I have said? Or
think of it in another way. You know the sheet of plate-glass that is
across the upper part of the fireplace in my study. Well, it depends on
the focus of your eyes, and your intention, whether you see the glass
and the fire-plate behind, or the room reflected in the glass. Now can
you imagine what it would be to see them all at once? It is like that.”
And he made an outward gesture with his hands.
“Well,” I said, “I scarcely understand. But please tell me, if you will,
your first vision of that kind.”
“I believe,” he began, “that when I was a child the first clear vision
came to me, but I only suppose it from my mother’s diary. I have not the
diary with me now, but there is an entry in it describing how I said I
had seen a face look out of a wall and had run indoors from the garden;
half frightened, but not terrified. But I remember nothing of it myself,
and my mother seems to have thought it must have been a waking dream;
and if it were not for what has happened to me since perhaps I should
have thought it a dream too. But now the other explanation seems to me
more likely. But the first clear vision that I remember for myself was
as follows:
“When I was about fourteen years old I came home at the end of one July
for my summer holidays. The pony-cart was at the station to meet me when
I arrived about four o’clock in the afternoon; but as there was a short
cut through the woods, I put my luggage into the cart, and started to
walk the mile and a half by myself. The field path presently plunged
into a pine wood, and I came over the slippery needles under the high
arches of the pines with that intense ecstatic happiness of home-coming
that some natures know so well. I hope sometimes that the first steps on
the other side of death may be like that. The air was full of mellow
sounds that seemed to emphasise the deep stillness of the woods, and of
mellow lights that stirred among the shadowed greenness. I know this
now, though I did not know it then. Until that day although the beauty
and the colour and sound of the world certainly affected me, yet I was
not conscious of them, any more than of the air I breathed, because I
did not then know what they meant. Well, I went on in this glowing
dimness, noticing only the trees that might be climbed, the squirrels
and moths that might be caught, and the sticks that might be shaped into
arrows or bows.
“I must tell you, too, something of my religion at that time. It was the
religion of most well-taught boys. In the fore-ground, if I may put it
so, was morality: I must not do certain things; I must do certain other
things. In the middle distance was a perception of God. Let me say that
I realised that I was present to Him, but not that He was present to me.
Our Saviour dwelt in this middle distance, one whom I fancied ordinarily
tender, sometimes stern. In the background there lay certain mysteries,
sacramental and otherwise. These were chiefly the affairs of grown-up
people. And infinitely far away, like clouds piled upon the horizon of a
sea, was the invisible world of heaven whence God looked at me, golden
gates and streets, now towering in their exclusiveness, now on Sunday
evenings bright with a light of hope, now on wet mornings unutterably
dreary. But all this was uninteresting to me. Here about me lay the
tangible enjoyable world––this was reality: there in a misty picture lay
religion, claiming, as I knew, my homage, but not my heart. Well; so I
walked through these woods, a tiny human creature, yet greater, if I had
only known it, than these giants of ruddy bodies and arms, and garlanded
heads that stirred above me.
“My path presently came over a rise in the ground; and on my left lay a
long glade, bordered by pines, fringed with bracken, but itself a folded
carpet of smooth rabbit-cropped grass, with a quiet oblong pool in the
centre, some fifty yards below me.
“Now I cannot tell you how the vision began; but I found myself, without
experiencing any conscious shock, standing perfectly still, my lips dry,
my eyes smarting with the intensity with which I had been staring down
the glade, and one foot aching with the pressure with which I had rested
upon it. It must have come upon me and enthralled me so swiftly that my
brain had no time to reflect. It was no work, therefore, of the
imagination, but a clear and sudden vision. This is what I remember to
have seen.
“I stood on the border of a vast robe; its material was green. A great
fold of it lay full in view, but I was conscious that it stretched for
almost unlimited miles. This great green robe blazed with embroidery.
There were straight lines of tawny work on either side which melted
again into a darker green in high relief. Right in the centre lay a pale
agate stitched delicately into the robe with fine dark stitches;
overhead the blue lining of this silken robe arched out. I was conscious
that this robe was vast beyond conception, and that I stood as it were
in a fold of it, as it lay stretched out on some unseen floor. But,
clearer than any other thought, stood out in my mind the certainty that
this robe had not been flung down and left, but that it clothed a
Person. And even as this thought showed itself a ripple ran along the
high relief in dark green, as if the wearer of the robe had just
stirred. And I felt on my face the breeze of His motion. And it was this
I suppose that brought me to myself.
“And then I looked again, and all was as it had been the last time I had
passed this way. There was the glade and the pool and the pines and the
sky overhead, and the Presence was gone. I was a boy walking home from
the station, with dear delights of the pony and the air-gun, and the
wakings morning by morning in my own carpeted bedroom, before me.
“I tried, however, to see it again as I had seen it. No, it was not in
the least like a robe; and above all where was the Person that wore it?
There was no life about me, except my own, and the insect life that sang
in the air, and the quiet meditative life of the growing things. But who
was this Person I had suddenly perceived? And then it came upon me with
a shock, and yet I was incredulous. It could not be the God of sermons
and long prayers who demanded my presence Sunday by Sunday in His little
church, that God Who watched me like a stern father. Why religion, I
thought, told me that all was vanity and unreality, and that rabbits and
pools and glades were nothing compared to Him who sits on the great
white throne.
“I need not tell you that I never spoke of this at home. It seemed to me
that I had stumbled upon a scene that was almost dreadful, that might be
thought over in bed, or during an idle lonely morning in the garden, but
must never be spoken of, and I can scarcely tell you when the time came
that I understood that there was but one God after all.”
The old man stopped talking. And I looked out again at the garden
without answering him, and tried myself to see how the poppies were
embroidered into a robe, and to hear how the chatter of the starlings
was but the rustle of its movement, the clink of jewel against jewel,
and the moan of the pigeon the creaking of the heavy silk, but I could
not. The poppies flamed and the birds talked and sobbed, but that was
all.
------------------------------------------------------------------------