But this much is only the superficial dressing of the story. The
reality is something different. It is this: that in an instant, and
for an instant, the dead lived, and all that are alive in the world
did for a moment see the Lord God and all His powers, His hosts of
angels, and all His array looking down upon them. They saw Him as one
sees by a flash of lightning in the darkness, and then instantly the
world was opaque again, limited, petty, habitual. That is the
tremendous reality of this story. Such glimpses have happened in
individual cases before. The Lives of the saints abound in them. Such
a glimpse it was that came to Devindranath Tagore upon the burning
ghat at Benares. But this was not an individual but a world
experience; the flash came to every one. Not always was it quite the
same, and thereby the doubter found his denials, when presently a sort
of discussion broke out in the obscurer Press. For this one testified
that it seemed that "One stood very near to me," and another saw "all
the hosts of heaven flame up towards the Throne."
And there were others who had a vision of brooding watchers, and
others who imagined great sentinels before a veiled figure, and some
one who felt nothing more divine than a sensation of happiness and
freedom such as one gets from a sudden burst of sunshine in the
spring.... So that one is forced to believe that something more than
wonderfully wonderful, something altogether strange, was seen, and
that all these various things that people thought they saw were only
interpretations drawn from their experiences and their imaginations.
It was a light, it was beauty, it was high and solemn, it made this
world seem a flimsy transparency....
Then it had vanished....
And people were left with the question of what they had seen, and just
how much it mattered.