"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.

"We both admit that matter and spirit are two separate creations, neither

of which contains the other; that the spiritual world consists of infinite

relations to which the finite material world gives rise; and that whereas

no one on earth has ever been able to identify himself by a sheer effort of

mind with the sum-total of earthly creations, all the more certainly can he

not rise to an apprehension of the relations which the spirit discerns

between these creations. So I might end the matter with one blow by denying

you the faculty of understanding God, just as you deny the pebbles by the

fiord the faculty of counting or of seeing themselves. How do you know that

they may not deny the existence of man, though man uses them to build his

house with?

"There is one fact which overthrows you--Infinitude. If you feel it within

you, how is it that you do not recognize the consequences? Can the finite

fully apprehend the infinite? If you cannot comprehend the relations which,

by your own admission, are infinite, how can you comprehend the remote

finality in which they are summed up? Order, of which the manifestation is

one of your needs, being infinite, can your finite reason comprehend it?

"Nor need you inquire why man cannot comprehend all he can conceive of,

for he likewise can conceive of much that he cannot comprehend. If I were

to prove to you that your mind is ignorant of everything that lies within

its grasp, would you grant me that it is impossible for it to conceive of

what lies beyond it? Should I not be justified, then, in saying, 'One of

the alternatives which bring God to nought at the bar of your judgment must

be true and the other false; Creation exists, you feel the need for an end;

must not that end be a noble one? Now, if in man matter is conterminous

with intelligence, why can you not be satisfied to grant that human

intelligence ends where the light begins of those superior spheres for

which is reserved the intuition of the God who, to you, is merely an

insoluble problem?

"The species lower than man have no comprehension of the universe; you

have. Why should there not be, above man again, species more intelligent

than he? Before using his powers to take measure of God, would not man do

well to know more about himself? Before defying the stars that give him

light, before attacking transcendent truths, ought he not rather to verify

the truths that immediately concern him?

"But I should answer the negations of doubt by negation. Well, then, I ask

you: Is there here on earth a single thing so self-evident that I am bound

to believe in it? I will show you in a minute that you believe firmly in

things that can act and yet are not beings, that can give birth to thought

and yet are not spirits, in living abstractions which the understanding

cannot grasp under any shape, which nowhere exist, but which you can

everywhere find; which have no possible names--though you have given them

names; which, like the God in human form whom you conceive of, perish

before the inexplicable, the incomprehensible, and the absurd. And I will

ask you: If you admit these things, why do you reserve your doubts for God?

"You believe in Number as the foundation on which rests the edifice of what

you call the exact sciences. Without number mathematics are impossible.

Well, then, what impossible being, to whom life everlasting should be

granted, could ever finish counting--and in what sufficiently concise

language could he utter--the numbers contained in the infinite number of

which the existence is demonstrated by your reason. Ask the greatest human

genius, and suppose him to sit for a thousand years leaning on a table, his

head in his hands, what would he answer?

"You know neither where number begins, where it pauses, nor where it ends.

Now you call it time, anon you call it space; by number only does anything

exist; but for number all substance would be one and the same; it alone

differentiates and modifies matter. Number is to your mind what it is to

matter, an intangible agent. But will you then make a god of it? Is it a

being? Is it a breath of God sent forth to organize the material universe,

wherein nothing takes shape but as a result of divisibility which is an

effect of number? The most minute as well as the most immense objects in

creation are distinguished from each other by quantity, quality, dimension,

and force,--are not these all conditions of number? That number is infinite

is a fact proved to your intellect, but of which no material proof is

obtainable. A mathematician will tell you that infinity of number is

certain, but cannot be demonstrated. And, my dear Pastor, believers will

tell you that God is Number endowed with motion, to be felt but not proved.

He, like the unit, is the origin of number though having nothing in common

with numbers. The existence of Number depends on that of the unit, which is

not a number, but the parent of them all. And God, dear Pastor Becker, is a

stupendous Unit, having nothing in common with His creations, but their

Parent nevertheless.

"You must grant me that you are equally ignorant as to where number begins

or ends, and as to where created eternity begins or ends? Why, then, if you

believe in number, should you deny God? Does not creation hold a place

between the infinite of inorganic substances and the infinite of the Divine

spheres, as the unit stands between the infinite of fractions--lately

termed decimals--and the infinite numbers you call whole numbers? Men alone

on earth comprehend number, the first step to the forecourt leading to

God, and even there reason stumbles. What! you can neither measure nor

grasp the primary abstraction proposed to you, and you want to apply your

puny standard to the ends of God's purpose? What if I should cast you into

the bottomless depths of Motion, the force which organizes number?

"If I were to tell you that the universe is nothing but Number and Motion,

we should already, you see, be speaking a different language. I understand

both terms; you do not. What, then, if I should go on to say that motion

and number are generated by the Word? This term, the Supreme Reason of

seers and prophets, who of old heard the voice of God that overthrew St.

Paul, is a laughing-stock to you--you men, though your own visible

works--communities, monuments, actions, and passions--all are the outcome

of your own feeble Word; and though without speech you would still be no

higher than the Orang of the woods, the great ape that is so nearly akin to

the Negro.

"Well, you believe firmly in number and motion, inexplicable and

incomprehensible as force and result, though I might apply to their

existence the same logical dilemma as just now relieved you of the

necessity of acknowledging that of God. You, a powerful reasoner, will

surely relieve me of the necessity for proving that the Infinite must be

everywhere the same, and that it is inevitably one? God alone is the

Infinite, for there obviously cannot be two Infinites. If, to use words in

their human sense, anything proved to you here on earth strikes you as

infinite, you may be sure you have in that a glimpse of one aspect of God.

"To proceed: you have found for yourselves a place in the Infinite of

number; you have fitted it to your stature by creating arithmetic--if you

can be said to create anything--the basis on which everything is built up,

even society. Arithmetic, or the use of number, has organized the moral

world, just as number, the only thing in which your professing Atheists

believe, organizes physical creation. This science of numbers ought to be

absolute, like everything that is intrinsically true; but it is, in fact,

purely relative, it has no absolute existence. You can give no proof of its

reality.

"To begin with, though this science is apt at summing up organized

substances, it is impotent as applied to organizing forces, since these are

infinite, whereas the former are finite. Man, whose intellect can conceive

of the Infinite, cannot deal with it as a whole; if he could, he would be

God. Hence your arithmetic, as applied to finite things and not to the

Infinite, is true in relation to the details you apprehend, but false in

relation to the whole which you cannot apprehend. Though nature does not

vary in her organizing forces and her elementary causes, which are

infinite, she is never the same in her finite results. Hence in all nature

you will find no two objects exactly alike.

"Thus, in the order of nature, two and two can never really make four,

since the units would have to be exactly equal; and you know that it is

impossible to find two leaves alike on one tree, or two specimens alike of

the same species of tree. This axiom of arithmetic then, which is false as

regards visible nature, is no less false in the invisible nature of your

abstractions, where there is the same dissimilarity in your ideas which are

derived from the objects of the visible world, only extended in their

relations; in fact, differences are even more strongly marked there than

elsewhere. Everything there being modified by the temperament, the

strength, the manners, and the habits of individuals, who are never alike,

the most trifling matters are representative of personal character.

"If man has ever succeeded in creating an unit, it was, no doubt, by

assigning equal weight and value to certain pieces of gold. Well, add a

rich man's ducat to a poor man's, and tell yourself that to the public

treasury these are equal quantities; but in the eyes of a thoughtful man,

one, morally speaking, is unquestionably greater than the other; one

represents a month's happiness, the other the most transient caprice. Two

and two only make four in the sense of a false and monstrous abstraction.

"A fraction, again, has no existence in nature, since what you call a part

is a thing complete in itself; and does it not often happen--and have we

not proof of the fact--that the hundredth part of some substance may be

stronger than what you call the whole? And if a fraction has no existence

in the natural world, far less does it exist in the moral world, where

ideas and feelings may be as various as the species of the vegetable

kingdom, but are always a whole. The theory of fractions, then, is another

concession of the mind. Number, with its 'infinitely small' and its

'infinite total,' is a power of which a small part only is known to you,

while its extent evades you. You have built a little cottage in the

infinitude of number; you have adorned it with hieroglyphics very learnedly

designed and painted; and you have said, 'Everything is here!'

"From abstract number we will pass on to number as applied to solids. Your

geometry states it as an axiom that a straight line is the shortest way

from one point to another; and astronomy shows you that God has given

motion only in curves. Here, then, in the same science, are two facts

equally well proved--one by the evidence of your senses, aided by the

telescope; the other by the testimony of your mind; but one contradicts the

other. Man, who is liable to error, asserts one, and the Maker of the

worlds--whom you have never found in error--contradicts it. Who can decide

between rectilinear and curvilinear geometry?--between the theory of

straight lines and the theory of curved lines? If, in His work, the

mysterious Maker, who attains His ends with miraculous directness, only

makes use of the straight line to divide it at a right angle and obtain a

curve, man himself cannot rely on it: the bullet a man wishes to send in a

straight line follows a curve, and when you want to hit a point in space

with certainty you propel the ball on its cruel parabola. Not one of your

learned men has arrived at the simple induction that the curved line is

that of the material world, and the straight line that of the spiritual

world; that one is the theory of finite creation, and the other the theory

of the infinite. Man alone--he alone here on earth having any

consciousness of the infinite--can know the straight line; he alone, in a

special organ, has the sense of the vertical. May not the predilection for

curved lines in some men be an indication of the impurity of their nature,

still too closely allied to the material substances which engender us? and

may not the love for straight lines, seen in lofty minds, be in them a

presentiment of heaven? Between these two lines lies a gulf as wide as

between the Finite and the Infinite, between Matter and Spirit, between Man

and the Idea, between Motion and the Thing moved, between the Creature and

God. Borrow the wings of Divine Love and you may cross that gulf. Beyond it

the revelation of the Word begins!

"The things you call material are nowhere devoid of thickness; lines are

the edges of solids having a power of action which you ignore in your

theorems, and that makes them false in relation to bodies regarded as a

whole; hence the constant destruction of human works, to which you have

unwittingly given active properties. Nature knows nothing but solid bodies;

your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature

constantly gives the lie to all your laws: can you name one to which no

fact makes an exception? The laws of statics are contradicted by a thousand

incidents in physics; a fluid overthrows the most stupendous mountains, and

so proves that the heaviest substances may be upheaved by imponderable

agents. Your laws of acoustics and optics are nullified by the sounds you

hear in your brain during sleep, and by the light of an electric flash, of

which the rays are often overpowering. You do not know how light is brought

to your intelligence, any more than you know the simple and natural process

by which it is changed to ruby, sapphire, opal, and emerald on the neck of

an Indian bird, while it lies dim and gray on the same bird under the misty

sky of Europe, nor why it beams perpetually white here in the heart of the

polar regions. You cannot tell whether color is a faculty with which bodies

are endowed, or an effect produced by the diffusion of light.

"You believe the whole sea to be salt without having ascertained that it is

so in its deepest places.

"You recognize the existence of various substances which traverse what you

call the Void: substances intangible under any known form assumed by

matter, and which meet and combine with it in spite of every obstacle. That

being the case, you believe in the results obtained by chemistry, though as

yet it knows no method of estimating the changes produced by the currents

to and fro of those substances as they pass through your crystals and your

instruments on the inappreciable waves of heat or of light, conducted or

repelled by the affinities of metals or vitrified flint. You obtain no

substances but what are dead, out of which you have driven the unknown

force which resists decomposition in all earthly things, the force of which

attraction, undulation, cohesion, and polarity are manifestations.

"Life is the mind of body; bodies are but a mode of detaining it, of

delaying it in its transit; if bodies were themselves living things, they

would be a cause; they would not die. When a man establishes the results of

the motion of which every form of creation has its share in proportion to

its power of absorbing it, you call him a Learned Man, as though genius

consisted in explaining what exists. Genius should lift its eyes above

effects. All your learned men would laugh if you should say to them, 'There

is a certain connecting relation between two beings, such as that if one of

them were here and the other in Java, they might feel the same sensation at

the same instant, and be aware of the fact, and question and answer each

other without a mistake.' And yet there are some mineral substances which

exhibit sympathies as far reaching as that of which I speak. You believe in

the power of electricity when it is fixed on the lodestone, but you deny it

as emanating from the soul. According to you, the moon, whose influence

over the tides seems to you proven, has none over the winds, over

vegetation, or over men; it can move the sea and eat into glass, but it

cannot affect the sick; it has undoubted effects on one-half of the human

race; none on the other half. These are your most precious convictions.

"We may go further: You believe in physics; but your physics are based,

like the Catholic religion, on an act of faith. Do they not recognize an

external force apart from bodies to which it imparts movement? You see its

effects, but what is it? Where is it? What is its essence, its life? Has it

any limits?----And you deny God!

"Thus most of your scientific axioms, though true in relation to man, are

false in relation to the Whole. Science is one, and you have divided it. To

know the true sense of the laws of phenomena, would it not be necessary to

know the correlations existing between the phenomena and the laws of the

whole? There is in all things an appearance, a presentment, which strikes

your sense; behind this presentment there is a soul moving--the body, and

the faculty. Where are the relations which hold things together studied or

taught? Nowhere. Have you, then, no absolute finality? Your best

ascertained theses rest on an analysis of the forms of matter, while the

spirit is constantly neglected.

"There is a supreme science of which some men--too late--get a glimpse,

though they dare not own it. These men perceive the necessity for

considering all bodies, not merely from the point of view of their

mathematical properties, but also from that of their whole relations and

occult affinities.

"The greatest of you all discerned, towards the end of his life, that all

things were at the same time cause and effect reciprocally; that the

visible worlds were co-ordinated to each other and captive to invisible

spheres. He groaned over having tried to establish absolute principles.

When counting his worlds, like grains of sand scattered throughout the

ether, he explained their connection by the laws of planetary and molecular

attraction. You hailed that man.--Well, and I tell you that he died in

despair. Assuming that the centrifugal and centripetal forces, which he

invented to account for the universe, were absolutely equal, the universe

would stand still, and he insisted on motion, though in an undefined

direction; but assuming the forces to be unequal, the worlds must at once

fall into confusion. Thus his laws were not final; there was another

problem still higher than that of attraction, on which his spurious glory

was founded. The pull of the stars against each other, and the centripetal

tendency of their individual motion, did not hinder him from seeking the

branch from which the whole cluster was hanging. Unhappy man; the more he

extended space, the heavier was his load. He told you that every part was

in equilibrium; but whither was the whole bound?

"He contemplated the space, infinite in the eyes of men, that is filled

with the groups of worlds, of which a small number are registered by our

telescopes, while its immensity is proved by the rapidity of light. This

sublime contemplation gave him a conception of the infinitude of worlds,

planted in space like flowers in a meadow, which are born like infants,

grow like men, die like old men, which live by assimilating from their

atmosphere the substances proper to nourish them, which have a centre and

principle of life, which protect themselves from each other by an

intervening space, which constitute a grand whole, that has its own life,

its own destination.

"At this prospect the man trembled. He knew that life is produced by the

union of the Thing with its first Principle; that death, or inertia--or

gravitation--is caused by a rupture between the Thing and the motion proper

to it; and he thus foresaw the crash of worlds, in ruins if God should

withhold His Word. Then he set to work to seek the traces of that Word in

the Apocalypse. You all thought him mad. Know this: he strove to earn

forgiveness for his genius.

"Wilfrid, you came to request me to resolve equations, to fly on a

rain-cloud, to plunge into the fiord and reappear as a swan. If science or

miracle were the end of humanity, Moses would have left you a calculus of

fluxions; Jesus Christ would have cleared up the dark places of science;

His apostles would have told you whence come those immense trains of gas or

of fused metals which rush revolving on a nucleus, solidifying as they seek

a place in the ether, and are sometimes violently projected within range of

a system where they are absorbed by a star, or crash into it by their

shock, or dissolve it by the infusion of deadly vapors. St. Paul, instead

of bidding you live in God, would have explained to you that nutrition is

the secret bond among all creation, and the visible bond among all living

animals. In our own day, the greatest miracle would be to square the

circle, a problem which you pronounce impossible, but which has no doubt

been solved in the progress of worlds by the intersection of some

mathematical line, whose curves are apparent to the eye of spirits elevated

to the highest spheres.

"Believe me, miracles are within us and not without us. Thus have natural

effects been wrought, which the nations deemed to be supernatural. Would

not God have been unjust if He had vouchsafed to show His power to some

generations, and had refused it to others? The Brazen Rod belongs to all.

Neither Moses nor Jacob, neither Zoroaster nor Paul, nor Pythagoras nor

Swedenborg, neither the most obscure evangelists nor the most amazing of

God's prophets, have been superior to what you might become. Only, nations

have their day of faith. If positive science were indeed the end of all

human effort, how is it--confess now--that every social community, every

great centre to which men gather, is invariably broken up by Providence? If

civilization were the final cause of the human species, could intelligence

perish? Would it perennially continue to be a purely individual possession?

"The greatness of all the nations that have ever been great has been

founded on exceptions: when the exception ceased to be, the power was dead.

Would not the Seers, the Prophets, the Evangelists, have laid their hand on

science instead of relying on faith; would they not have hammered at your

brains rather than have touched your hearts? They all came to drive the

nations to God; they all proclaimed the way of life in the simple words

which lead to the Heavenly Kingdom; and fired with love and faith, and

inspired by the Word which hovers over the nations, compels them, vivifies

them, and uplifts them, they never used it for any human end. Your great

geniuses, poets, kings, and sages are swallowed up with their towns, and

the desert has buried them under a shroud of sand; while the names of

these good shepherds still are blessed and survive every catastrophe.

"We can never agree on any point. Gulfs lie between us. You are on the side

of darkness, I live in the true light.

"Is this the word you desired of me? I utter it with joy; it may change

you. Know, then, that there are sciences of Matter and sciences of the

Spirit. Where you see bodies, I see forces tending towards each other by a

creative impulse. To me the character of a body is the sign-manual of its

first principles and the expression of its properties. These principles

give rise to certain affinities which elude you, but which are connected

with centres. The different species to which life is distributed are

unfailing springs which communicate with each other. Each has its specific

function.

"Man is at once cause and effect; he is nourished, but he nourishes in

return. When you call God the Creator, you belittle Him. He did not, as you

imagine, create plants, animals, and the stars; could He act by such

various means? Must He not have proceeded by unity of purpose? He emitted

principles which were compelled to develop in accordance with His general

laws, and subject to the conditions of their environment.

"In point of fact, all the affinities are bound together by immediate

similarities; the life of worlds is attracted to centres by a greedy

aspiration, just as you are all driven by hunger to seek nourishment. To

give you an instance of affinities linked to similarities: the secondary

law on which the creations of your mind rest--music, a celestial art--is

the active evidence of this principle: is it not an assemblage of sounds

harmonized by number? Is not sound a condition of the air under

compression, dilatation, and repercussion? You know of what the air is

composed? Azote, carbon, and oxygen. Since you can produce no sound in a

vacuum, it is evident that music and the human voice are the result of

organic chemical elements, acting in unison with the same substances

prepared within you by your mind, and co-ordinated by means of light, the

great foster-mother of this globe; for can you have cogitated on the

quantities of nitre deposited by the snows, on the discharge of thunder, on

plants which derive from the air the elements they contain, and have failed

to conclude that it is the sun that fuses and diffuses the subtle essence

which nourishes all things here below? Swedenborg truly said, 'The earth is

a man.'

"All your sciences of to-day, which make you so great in your own eyes, are

a mere trifle compared with the light that floods the Seer.

"Cease, cease to question me; we speak a different language. I have used

yours for once, to throw a flash of faith upon your souls, to cast a corner

of my mantle over you, and tempt you away to the glorious regions of

prayer. Is it God's part to stoop to you? Is it not yours rather to rise to

Him? If human reason has so soon exhausted the limits of its powers merely

by laying God out to prove His existence, without succeeding in doing so,

is it not evident that it must seek some other way of knowing Him? That

other way is in ourselves. The Seer and the believer have within themselves

eyes more piercing than are those eyes which are bent on things of earth,

and they discern a dawn.

"Understand this saying: Your most exact sciences, your boldest

speculations, your brightest flashes of light, are but clouds. Above them

all is the sanctuary whence the true Light is shed."

She sat down and was silent; and her calm features betrayed not the least

sign of the trepidation which commonly disturbs an orator after his least

inflamed speech.

Wilfrid whispered into the pastor's ear, leaning over him to do so:

"Who told her all this?"

"I do not know," was the reply.

"He was milder on the Falberg," Minna remarked.

Seraphita passed her hands over her eyes, and said with a smile:

"You are very pensive this evening, gentlemen. You treat me and Minna like

men to whom you would talk politics or discuss trade, while we are but

girls to whom you should tell fairy-tales while drinking tea, as is the

custom in our evenings in Norway.--Come, Pastor Becker, tell me some Saga

which I do not know. That of Frithiof, in which you believe, and which you

promised to tell me, or the story of the peasant's son who has a ship that

speaks and has a soul? I dream of the frigate _Ellida_. Is it not on that

fairy vessel that girls should sail the seas?"

"Since we have come down to Jarvis again," said Wilfrid, whose eyes were

fixed on Seraphita as those of a robber hidden in the gloom are fixed on

the spot where treasure lies, "tell me why you do not marry?"

"You are all born widowers or widows," replied she. "My marriage was

decided on at my birth; I am betrothed----"

"To whom?" they all asked in a breath.

"Allow me to keep my secret," said she. "I promise, if our father will

grant it, to invite you to that mysterious wedding."

"Is it to be soon?"

"I am waiting."

A long silence ensued.

"The spring is come," said Seraphita. "The noise of waters and of breaking

ice has begun; will you not come to hail the first springtime of the new

century?"

She rose and, followed by Wilfrid, went to a window which David had thrown

open. After the long stillness of winter, the vast waters were stirring

beneath the ice, and sang through the fiord like music; for there are

sounds which distance glorifies, and which reach the ear in waves that seem

to bring refreshment and light.

"Cease, Wilfrid," said she, "cease to cherish evil thoughts whose triumph

will be a torment to endure. Who could fail to read your wishes in the

sparkle of your eyes? Be good; take a step in well-doing! Is it not a step

beyond the mere love of men to sacrifice yourself entirely to the happiness

of the one you love? Submit to me, and I will lead you into a path where

you will attain to all the greatness you dream of, and where love will be

really infinite."

She left Wilfrid lost in thought.

"Can this gentle creature really be the prophetess who but now flashed

lightnings from her eyes, whose words thundered about the worlds, whose

hand wielded the axe of Doubt in defiance of our sciences?" said he to

himself. "Have we been asleep for these few minutes?"

"Minna," said Seraphitus, returning to the pastor's daughter, "the eagles

gather where the dead lie, the turtle-dove flies to the springs of living

water under green and peaceful groves. The eagle soars to the skies, the

dove descends from them. Venture no more into regions where you will find

neither fountains nor shade. If this morning you could not look into the

gulf without destruction, keep your powers for him who will love you. Go,

poor child, I am betrothed, as you know."

Minna rose and went with Seraphitus to the window, where Wilfrid still was

standing. They could all three hear the Sieg leaping under the force of the

upper waters, which were bringing down the trees that had been frozen into

the ice. The fiord had found its voice again. Illusion was over. They

wondered at Nature bursting her bonds, and answering in noble harmonies to

the Spirit whose call had awakened her.

When the three guests had left this mysterious being, they were filled with

an indefinable feeling which was not sleep, nor torpor, nor astonishment,

but a mixture of all three, which was neither twilight nor daybreak, but

which made them long for light. They were all very thoughtful.

"I begin to think that she is a spirit veiled in human form," said the

pastor.

Wilfrid, in his own room again, calmed and convinced, knew not how to

contend with powers so divinely majestic.

Minna said to herself:

"Why will he not allow me to love him?"

V

THE FAREWELL

There is in man a phenomenon which is the despair of those reflective minds

who endeavor to find some meaning in the march of social vicissitudes, and

to formulate some laws of progress for the movement of intellect. However

serious a fact may be, or, if supernatural facts could exist, however

magnificent a miracle could be, publicly performed, the lightning flash of

the fact, the thunderbolt of the miracle would be lost in the moral ocean,

and the surface, rippled for an instant by some slight ebullition, would at

once resume the level of its ordinary swell.

Does the Voice, to be more surely heeded, pass through an animal's jaws?

Does the Hand write in strange characters on the cornice of the hall where

the Court is reveling? Does the Eye light up the King's slumbers? Does the

Prophet read the dream? Does Death, when summoned, stand in the luminous

space where a man's faculties revive? Does the Spirit crush matter at the

foot of the mystical ladder of the seven spiritual worlds hung one above

another in space, and seen by the floods of light that fall in cascades

down the steps of the heavenly floor? Still, however deep the inner

revelation, however distinct the outward sign, by the morrow Balaam doubts

both his ass and himself; Belteshazzar and Pharaoh call in seers to explain

the sign--Daniel or Moses.

The Spirit descends, snatches a man above the earth, opens the seas and

shows him the bottom of them, calls up vanished generations, gives life to

the dry bones thickly strewn in the great valley; the Apostle writes the

_Apocalypse_; and twenty centuries later human science confirms the Apostle

and translates his figures of speech into axioms. What difference does it

make? The mass of people live to-day as they lived yesterday, as they lived

in the first Olympiad, as they lived the first day after creation, and on

the eve of the great cataclysm. Doubt drowns everything in its waters. The

same waves beat, with the self-same ebb and flow, on the human granite that

hems in the sea of intellect.

Man asks himself whether indeed he saw what he saw, whether he really heard

the words that were spoken, whether the fact was a fact, and the idea

really an idea; and then he goes on his way, he thinks of his business, he

obeys the inevitable servitor of Death--Forgetfulness, who throws his black

cloak over the old humanity of which the younger has no remembrance. Man

never ceases to move, to go on, to grow as a vegetable grows, till the day

when the axe falls. If this flood-like force, this mounting pressure of

bitter waters, hinders all progress, it also, no doubt, is a warning of

death. None but the loftier spirits open to faith can discern Jacob's

mystical stair.

After listening to the reply in which Seraphita, being so urgently

questioned, had unrolled the divine scroll, as an organ fills a church with

its roar, and shows the power of the musical universe by flooding the most

inaccessible vaults with its solemn notes, playing, like light, among the

frail wreaths of the capitals, Wilfrid went home, appalled at having seen

the world in ruins, and, above the ruins, a light unknown, shed by the hand

of that young creature.

On the following day he was still thinking of it, but his terrors were

allayed; he was not in ruins, nor even changed--his passions and ideas woke

up fresh and vigorous.

He went to breakfast with the Minister, and found him lost in the study of

Jean Wier's treatise, which he had been looking through that morning to be

able to reassure his visitor. With the childlike simplicity of a sage, the

pastor had turned down the leaves at some pages where Jean Wier adduced

authentic evidence demonstrating the possibility of such things as had

happened the day before; for to the learned an idea is an event, whereas

the greatest events are to them hardly an idea.

By the time these two philosophers had swallowed their fifth cup of tea,

that mystical evening seemed quite natural. The heavenly truths were more

or less substantial arguments, and open to discussion. Seraphita was a more

or less eloquent girl; allowance must be made for her exquisite voice, her

enchanting beauty, her fascinating manner, all the oratorical skill by

which an actor can put a world of feelings and ideas into a sentence which

in itself is often quite commonplace.

"Pooh!" said the good minister, with a little philosophical grimace, as he

spread a slice of bread with salt butter, "the answer to all these riddles

is six feet beneath the mould!"

"At the same time," said Wilfrid, sugaring his tea, "I cannot understand

how a girl of sixteen can know so many things; for she squeezed everything

into her speech as if it were in a vise."

"But only read the story of the Italian girl who, at twelve years old,

could speak forty-two languages, ancient and modern," said the pastor. "And

again, that of the monk who read thought by smell. These are in Jean Wier,

and in a dozen other treatises which I will give you to read, a thousand

proofs rather than one."

"I daresay, my dear Pastor; but Seraphita remains to me a wife it would be

divine joy to possess."

"She is all intellect," replied the minister dubiously.

Some days passed by, during which the snow in the valleys insensibly melted

away; the greenery of the forests peeped through like a fresh growth;

Norwegian nature made itself beautiful in anticipation of its brief bridal

day. All this time, though the milder temperature allowed of open-air

exercise, Seraphita remained in solitary seclusion. Thus Wilfrid's passion

was enhanced by the aggravating vicinity of the girl he loved, and who

refused to be seen. When the inscrutable being admitted Minna, Minna could

detect the symptoms of an inward fever; Seraphita's voice was hollow, and

her complexion was wan; whereas hitherto its transparency might have been

compared by a poet to that of the diamond, it now had the sheen of the

topaz.

"Have you seen her?" asked Wilfrid, who had prowled round the house,

awaiting Minna's return.

"We shall lose him!" said the girl, her eyes filling with tears.

"Do not try to fool me!" cried the stranger, controlling the vehemence of

tone that expressed his fury. "You can only love Seraphita as one girl

loves another, not with such love as I feel for her. You cannot conceive

what peril you would be in if there were anything to alarm my

jealousy.--Why can I not go to see her? Is it you who raise difficulties?"

"I cannot think," said Minna, calm on the surface, but quaking with mortal

terror, "what right you have to sound the depths of my heart.--Yes, I love

him," she went on, summoning the courage of conviction to confess the faith

of her soul. "But my jealousy, though natural to love, fears nobody here.

Alas! What I am jealous of is some unconfessed feeling in which he is

absorbed. Between him and me lies a space I can never abridge. I want to

know whether the stars love him more than I, whether they or I would be the

more eagerly devoted to his happiness? Why, why, should I not be free to

declare my affection? In the presence of death we may all confess our

attachment--and Seraphitus is dying."

"Minna, indeed you are under a mistake; the siren round whom my desires

have so often hovered, who allows me to admire her as she reclines on her

couch, so graceful, fragile, and suffering, is not a man."

"Nay," replied Minna, in some agitation, "he whose powerful hand guided me

over the Falberg to the soeter under the shelter of the Ice-cap up

there"--and she pointed to the peak--"is certainly not a mere, weak girl.

If you had but heard her prophesy! Her poetry is the music of thought. No

young girl could have had the solemn depth of voice which stirred my soul."

"What certainty have you----?" Wilfrid began.

"None but that of my heart!" replied Minna in confusion, and hastily

interrupting the speaker.

"Well, but I," cried Wilfrid, with a terrible glance of murderous eagerness

and desire, "I, who know what the extent of her power is over me--I will

prove your mistake."

At this moment, when words were rushing to Wilfrid's tongue as vehemently

as ideas in his head, he saw Seraphita come out of the Swedish Castle,

followed by David. The sight of her soothed his effervescent state.

"Look," said he; "none but a woman can have that grace and languor."

"He is ill; it is his last walk!" said Minna.

At a sign from his mistress, David left her, and she advanced towards

Wilfrid and Minna.

"Let us go to the falls of the Sieg," said the mysterious being; it was the

wish of a sufferer which all hasten to accede to.

A thin, white haze hung over the heights and dales of the fiord, and the

peaks, glittering like stars, pierced above it, giving it the effect of a

milky way moving onwards. Through this earth-born vapor the sun was visible

as a globe of red-hot iron. In spite of these last freaks of winter, gusts

of mild air, bringing the scent of the birch-trees, already covered with

their yellow flowers, and the rich perfume exhaled by the larches, whose

silky tufts were all displayed--breezes warm with the incense and the

breathing of the earth testified to the exquisite springtime of Northern

lands, the brief rapture of a most melancholy nature.

The wind was beginning to roll away the veil of mist that hardly hid the

view of the gulf. The birds were singing.

Where the sun had not dried off the frost that trickled down the road in

murmuring rills, the bark of the trees was pleasing to the eye by its

fantastic appearance.

They all three went along the strand in silence. Wilfrid and Minna were

lost in contemplation of the magical scene after their long endurance of

the monotonous winter landscape. Their companion was pensive, and walked as

though trying to distinguish one voice in the concert. They reached the

rocks between which the Sieg tumbles, at the end of the long avenue of

ancient fir-trees which the torrent had cut in meandering through the

forest, a path covered in by a groined arch of boughs, meeting like those

of a cathedral. From thence the whole of the fiord was seen, and the sea

sparkled on the horizon like a steel blade. At this instant the clouds

vanished, showing the blue sky. Down in the hollows and round the trees the

air was full of floating sparkles, the diamond dust swept up by a light

breeze, and dazzling gems of drops were hanging at the tip of the branches

of each pyramid. The torrent was rolling below; a smoke came up from the

surface, tinted in the sunshine with every hue of light; its beams,

decomposed, displayed perfect rainbows of the seven colors, like the play

of a thousand prisms meeting and crossing there. This wild shore was

curtained with various kinds of lichen, a rich web, sheeny with moisture,

like some gorgeous hanging of silk. Heath, already in blossom, crowned the

rocks with flowers in skilful disorder. All this stirring foliage, tempted

by the living waters, hung their heads over it like hair; the larches waved

their lace-like arms, as if caressing the pines, that stood rigid like

careworn old men.

This luxuriant display was a contrast to the solemnity of the antique

colonnades of the forests, range upon range on the hillside, and to the

broad sheet of the fiord, in which the torrent drowned its fury at the feet

of the three spectators. Beyond it all, the open sea closed in this

picture, traced by the greatest of poets--Chance--to which we owe the

medley beauty of creation when left, as it would seem, to itself. Jarvis

was a speck almost lost in this landscape, in this immensity--sublime, as

everything is, which, having but a brief existence, offers a transient

image of perfection; for by a law, fatal only to our sight, creations that

appear perfect, the delight of our heart and of our eyes, have but one

spring to live here.

At the top of that cliff these three beings might easily fancy themselves

alone in all the world.

"How exquisite!" exclaimed Wilfrid.

"Nature sings its hymns," said Seraphita. "Is not this music delicious?

Confess now, Wilfrid, no woman you ever knew could create for herself so

magnificent a retreat. Here I experience a feeling that the sight of great

cities rarely inspires, and which makes me long to remain here, lying

among these grasses of such rapid growth. Then, with my eyes on the sky, my

heart laid bare, lost in the sense of immensity, I could let myself listen

to the sighs of the flower, which, scarcely released from its primitive

nature, would fain run about; and to the cries of the eider, aggrieved at

having only wings, while I thought of the cravings of man, who has

something of everything, and who also is for ever full of desires!--But

this, Wilfrid, is a woman's poetic fancy! You can find a voluptuous thought

in that hazy expanse of water; in those fantastic veils, behind which

nature plays like some coquettish bride; and in this atmosphere, where she

perfumes her green hair for her bridal. You would fain see the form of a

naiad in that wreath of mist, and I, as you think, ought to hear a manly

voice in the torrent."

"And is not love in it all, like a bee in a flower?" replied Wilfrid, who,

seeing in her for the first time some trace of earthly feeling, thought it

a favorable moment for the expression of his fervent affection.

"Always the same?" said Seraphita, laughing, Minna having left them; the

girl was climbing a crag where she had seen some blue saxifrages.

"Always!" exclaimed Wilfrid. "Listen," he said, with an imperious glance

that met a panoply of adamant, "you know not who I am, nor what my power

is, nor what I demand. Do not reject my last entreaty. Be mine, for the

sake of the world within your heart! Be mine, that my conscience may be

pure, that a heavenly voice may sound in my ears and inspire me aright in

the undertaking I have vowed to carry out, impelled by my hatred of the

nations, but to be achieved for their welfare if only you are with me. What

nobler mission may a woman dream of?--I came to these lands meditating a

great scheme."

"And you are prepared to sacrifice it and its glories," said she, "to a

very simple girl, whom you will love, and who will guide you into a

peaceful path?"

"What do I care? I only want you! This is my secret," he replied, going on

with his speech. "I have traveled all over the North, the great workshop

where the new races are produced who overspread the earth like floods of

humanity sent forth to renew worn-out civilization. I wanted to have begun

my work on one of these points, conquering there the ascendency that force

and intellect can assert over a small race; to have trained it to battle,

to have declared war, and have sent it raging like a conflagration to

consume Europe, while shouting to these 'Liberty!' to those 'Plunder!' to

some 'Glory!' to others 'Pleasure!' I, standing meanwhile like the image of

Fate, pitiless and cruel, moving like the storm which assimilates from the

atmosphere the atoms of which the lightning is compounded, and feeding on

men like a rapacious monster. I should then have conquered Europe; she is

now at a period when she looks for the coming of the new Messiah, who is to

devastate the world and to reform the nations. Europe can believe in no one

but Him who will trample her under foot.

"Some day historians and poets would have justified my existence, have

magnified me, have ascribed great ideas to me--to me, to whom this huge

pleasantry, written in blood, is but revenge.

"But, dear Seraphita, what I have seen has disgusted me with the North;

force here is too blind, and I crave for the Indies. A duel with a selfish,

cowardly, and mercenary government fascinates me more. Besides, it is

easier to arouse the imagination of the races that dwell at the foot of

Caucasus than to convince the minds of men in these frozen lands. I am

tempted to cross the Russian steppes, to reach the frontiers of Asia, to

cover it as far as the Ganges with my victorious flood of human beings, and

then I shall overthrow the English rule. Seven men, at different periods,

have already carried out such a scheme. I shall renew Art, as the Saracens

did when Mahomet cast them over Europe. I will not be so sordid a king as

those who now govern the ancient provinces of the Roman Empire, quarreling

with their subjects over custom-house dues. No, nothing shall arrest the

flash of my gaze or the storm of my speech! My feet, like those of Genghis

Khan, shall cover a third of the globe; my hand shall grasp Asia as did

that of Aurung Zeeb.

"Be my partner; take your seat, fair and lovely being, on a throne. I have

never doubted my success, but with you to dwell in my heart, I should be

certain of it."

"I have reigned already," said Seraphita.

The words were like the blow dealt by the axe of a skilful woodsman at the

root of a sapling, felling it at once. Men alone can know what a storm a

woman can rouse in a man's soul when he has been trying to impress her with

his strength or his power, his intellect or his superiority, and the

capricious fair nods her head and says, "Oh, that is nothing!" or, with a

bored smile, observes, "I know all that," when power is as nought to her.

"What!" cried Wilfrid in despair, "the riches of Art, the wealth of the

world, the splendor of a court----"

She checked him by a mere curl of her lips, and said:

"Beings more powerful than you are have offered me more."

"Well, have you no soul, then, that you are not fascinated by the prospect

of consoling a great man who will sacrifice everything to dwell with you in

a little home by the side of a lake?"

"Why," said she, "I am loved with a boundless love."

"By whom?" cried Wilfrid, going towards Seraphita with a frenzied gesture,

as if to fling her into the foaming falls of the Sieg.

She looked at him; his arm dropped; and she pointed to Minna, who came

running down, all rose and white, and as pretty as the flowers she carried

in her hand.

"My child!" said Seraphitus, going forward to meet her.

Wilfrid stood on the edge of the cliff as motionless as a statue, lost in

thought, longing to cast himself into the flow of the torrent, like one of

the fallen trees that passed under his eyes and vanished in the abyss

beneath.

"I gathered them for you," said Minna, giving the nose-gay to the being

she adored. "One of them--this one," said she, picking out a particular

blossom, "is like the flower we gathered on the Falberg."

Seraphitus looked at the blossom and then at Minna.

"Why do you question me thus? Do you doubt me?"

"No," said the girl, "my confidence in you is unbounded. While you are far

more beautiful to me than this beautiful scenery, you also seem to me to be

superior in intelligence to all the rest of humanity. When I have been with

you, I seem to have communed with God. I only wish----"

"What?" asked Seraphitus, with a flashing look that revealed to the girl

the vast distance that divided them.

"I wish I could suffer in your stead."

"This is the most dangerous of Thy creatures," thought Seraphitus. "Is it a

criminal thought, O God, to long to present her to Thee?--Have you

forgotten," he said aloud, "all I told you up there?" and he pointed

upwards to the peak of the Ice-cap.

"Now he is terrible again!" thought Minna with a shudder.

The roar of the Sieg formed an accompaniment to the thoughts of these three

beings, who stood together for a few minutes on a projecting slab of rock,

parted, as they were, by immeasurable gulfs in the spiritual world.

"Teach me then, Seraphitus," said Minna, in a voice as silvery as a pearl

and as gentle as the movements of a sensitive plant. "Teach me what I must

do to avoid loving you? Who could fail to admire you? And love is the

admiration that is never tired."

"Poor child!" said Seraphitus, turning pale, "only one Being can be loved

thus."

"Who is that?" asked Minna.

"You shall know!" was the reply in the weak voice of one who lies down to

die.

"Help! He is dying!" cried Minna.

Wilfrid hastened forward, and seeing this being reclining gracefully on a

block of gneiss over which time had thrown its carpet of velvet, its

glistening lichens, and dusky mosses, lustrous in the sunshine,--

"She is lovely!" he exclaimed.

"This is the last glance I may give to nature in travail," said Seraphita,

collecting all her strength to rise. She went to the edge of the cliff,

whence she could see the whole of the sublime landscape, but lately wrapped

in its mantle of snow, now full of life, green and flowery.

"Farewell," said she, "oh, burning hotbed of love! whence everything tends

from the centre to the utmost circumference, while the extremities are

gathered up, like a woman's hair, to be spun into the unknown plait by

which thou art linked, in the invisible ether, to the Divine Idea!

"Behold him who is bending over the furrow, watered with his sweat, and

pausing for an instant to look up to heaven; behold her who gathers the

children in to feed them from her breast; him who knots the ropes in the

fury of the tempest; her who sits in the niche of a rock awaiting her

father; and, again, all those who hold out their hands for help after

spending their life in thankless toil? Peace and courage to them all, and

to all farewell!

"Do you hear the cry of the soldier who dies unknown, the wrath of the man

who laments, disappointed, in the desert? Peace and courage to all, to all

farewell! Farewell, you who die for the kings of the earth; but farewell,

too, ye races without a native land, and farewell, lands without a

people--seeking each other. Farewell, above all, to thee, sublime exile,

who knowest not where to lay thy head! Farewell, dear innocence, dragged

away by the hair of your head for having loved too well! Farewell, mothers

sitting by your dying sons! Farewell, holy, broken-hearted wives! Farewell,

O ye who are poor, young, weak, and suffering, whose woes I have so often

made my own! Farewell, all ye who gravitate in the sphere of instinct,

suffering there for others!

"Farewell, ye discoverers who seek the East through the thick darkness of

abstractions as grand as first principles; and ye martyrs of thought, led

by thought to the true light! Farewell, realms of inquiry, where I can hear

the moans of insulted genius, the sigh of the sage to whom light comes--too

late!

"I perceive the angelic harmonies, the wafted fragrance, the incense from

the heart exhaled by those who move on, praying, comforting, diffusing

divine light and heavenly balm to sorrowing souls. Courage, Choir of Love!

to whom the nations cry, 'Comfort us! Protect us!' Courage, and farewell!

"Farewell, rock of granite, thou shalt become a flower; farewell, flower,

thou shalt be a dove; farewell, dove, thou shalt be a woman; farewell,

woman, thou shalt be Suffering; farewell, man, thou shalt be Belief;

farewell, you, who shall be all love and prayer!"

Exhausted by fatigue, this inexplicable being for the first time leaned on

Wilfrid and Minna to support her back to her house. Wilfrid and Minna felt

some mysterious contagion from her touch. They had gone but a few steps

when they met David in tears.

"She is going to die; why have you brought her here?" he exclaimed from

afar.

Seraphita was lifted up by the old man, who had recovered the strength of

youth, and he flew with her to the door of the Swedish castle, like an

eagle carrying some white lamb to his eyrie.

VI

THE ROAD TO HEAVEN

On the day after Seraphita had had this foretaste of her end, and had

bidden farewell to the earth, as a prisoner looks at his cell before

quitting it for ever, she was suffering such pain as compelled her to

remain in the absolute quietude of those who endure extreme anguish.

Wilfrid and Minna went to see her, and found her lying on her couch of

furs. Her soul, still shrouded in the flesh, shone through the veil,

bleaching it, as it were, from day to day. The progress made by the spirit

in undermining the last barrier which divided it from the infinite was

called sickness; the hour of life was named death. David wept to see his

mistress suffering, and refused to listen to her consolations; the old man

was as unreasonable as a child. The pastor was urgent on Seraphita to take

some remedies; but all was in vain.

One morning she asked for the two she had been so fond of, telling them

that this was the last of her bad days. Wilfrid and Minna came in great

alarm; they knew that they were about to lose her. Seraphita smiled at

them, as those smile who are departing to a better world; her head drooped

like a flower overweighted with dew, which opens its cup for the last time

and exhales its last fragrance to the air. She looked at them with sadness,

of which they were the cause; she had ceased to think of herself, and they

felt this without being able to express their grief, mingled as it was with

gratitude.

Wilfrid remained standing, silent and motionless, lost in such

contemplation as is suggested by things so vast that they make us

understand, here on earth, the Supreme Immensity. Minna, emboldened by the

weakness of this powerful being, or perhaps by her dread of losing her

beloved for ever, bent down and murmured, "Seraphitus--let me follow you!"

"Can I hinder you?"

"But why do you not love me enough to remain here?"

"I could not love anything here."

"What, then, do you love?"

"Heaven."

"Are you worthy of heaven if you thus despise God's creatures here?"

"Minna, can we love two beings at the same time? Is the Best-beloved really

the Best-beloved if He does not fill the whole heart? Ought He not to be

the first and last and only One? Does not she who is all love quit the

world for her Beloved? Her whole family becomes but a memory; she has but

one relation--it is He! Her soul is no longer her own, but His! If she

keeps anything within her that is not His, she does not love; no, she does

not love! Is loving half-heartedly loving at all? The voice of the Beloved

makes her all glad and flows through her veins like a purple tide, redder

than the blood; His look is a light that flashes through her, she is fused

with Him; where He is all is beautiful. He is warmth to her soul, He lights

everything; near Him, is it ever cold or dark to her? He is never absent;

He is always within us, we think in Him, with Him, for Him. That, Minna, is

how I love Him."

"Whom?" said Minna, gripped by consuming jealousy.

"God!" replied Seraphitus, whose voice flashed upon their souls like a

beacon light of freedom blazing from hill to hill--"God, who never betrays

us! God, who does not desert us, but constantly fulfils our desires, and

who alone can perennially satisfy His creatures with infinite and unmixed

joys! God, who is never weary, and who only has smiles! God, ever new, who

pours His treasures into the soul, who purifies it without bitterness, who

is all harmony, all flame! God, who enters into us to blossom there, who

fulfils all our aspirations, who never calls us to account if we are His,

but gives Himself wholly, ravishes us, and expands and multiplies us in

Himself--God, in short!

"Minna, I love you because you may be His! I love you because if you come

to Him you will be mine."

"Then lead me to Him," said she, kneeling down. "Take me by the hand; I

will leave you no more."

"Lead us, Seraphita," cried Wilfrid vehemently, coming forward to kneel

with Minna. "Yes, you have made me thirst for the Light and thirst for the

Word; I thirst with the love you have implanted in my heart, I will cherish

your soul in mine; impart your Will, and I will do whatsoever you bid me

do. If I may not win you, I will treasure every feeling that you can infuse

into me as part of you! If I cannot be united to you but by my strength

alone, I will cling as flame clings to what it consumes.--Speak!"

"Angel!" cried the incomprehensible being, with a look that seemed to

enfold them in an azure mantle. "Angel! heaven is thine inheritance!"

And a great silence fell after this cry, which rang in the souls of Wilfrid

and Minna like the first chord of some celestial symphony.

"If you desire to train your feet to walk in the way that leads to heaven,

remember that the first steps are rough," said the suffering soul. "God

must be sought for His own sake. In that sense He is a jealous God, He will

have you altogether His; but when you have given yourself to Him, He never

abandons you. I will leave you the keys of the kingdom where His light

shines, where you will everywhere be in the bosom of the Father, in the

heart of the Bridegroom. No sentinel guards the gates; you can enter from

any side; His palace, His treasures, His sceptre, nothing is forbidden; He

says to all, 'Take them freely!' But you must will to go thither. You must

start as for a journey, leave your home, give up your plans, bid farewell

to your friends--father, mother, sister, even the infant brother that

cries--an eternal farewell, for you will never return, any more than

martyrs bound for the stake returned to their homes; you must, in short,

strip yourself of the feelings and possessions to which men cling;

otherwise, you will not be wholly given up to your enterprise.

"Do for God what you would have done for your ambitious schemes, what you

do when you take up an art, what you did when you loved a creature more

than Him, or when you were studying some secret of human knowledge. Is not

God Knowledge itself, Love itself, the Fount of all poetry? Is not His

treasure a thing to covet? His treasure is inexhaustible, His poetry is

infinite, His love unchangeable, His knowledge infallible and full of

mysteries. Cling to nothing, then; He will give you All! Yes, in His heart

you will find possessions beyond all compare with those you leave on earth.

"What I tell you is the truth. You will have His power, you will be allowed

to use it as you use anything that belongs to your lover or your mistress.

"Alas! most men doubt, lack faith, will, and perseverance. Though some set

out on the road, they presently look back and return. Few are they who know

how to choose between these two extremes--to go or to stay; heaven or the

muck-heap. All hesitate. Weakness leads to wandering, passion to evil ways,

vice as a habit clogs the feet, and man makes no progress towards a better

state.

"Every being passes a preliminary life in the Sphere of Instinct, laboring

with endless toil to amass earthly treasures, only to recognize their

futility at last. But how many times must we live through this first life

before quitting it fit to begin another stage of trial in the Sphere of

Abstractions, where the mind is exercised in false science, and the spirit

is at last weary of human speech--for, matter being exhausted, the spirit

prevails? How many forms must the being elect to heaven wear out, before he

has learned the preciousness of silence, and of the solitude whose

star-strewn steppes are the floor of the spiritual world? It is after

testing and trying the void that his eyes turn to the right path. Then

there are other existences to be worn through or ever he may reach the road

where the Light shines.

"Death marks a stage on this journey. After that, his experience is in a

reversed order; it takes a whole life, perhaps, to acquire the virtues that

are the antithesis of the errors in which he has previously lived.

"Thus, first we live the life of suffering, where torments make us thirst

for love. Next comes the life of loving, where devotion to the creature

teaches us devotion to the Creator; where the virtues of love, its thousand

sacrifices, its angelic hope, its joys paid for by grief, its patience and

resignation, excite an appetite for things divine. After this comes the

life during which we seek, in silence, the traces of the Word, and become

humble and charitable. Then the life of high desire; finally, the life of

prayer. There we find eternal sunshine; there are flowers, there is

fruition!

"The qualities we acquire, and which slowly grow up in us, are the

invisible bonds binding each of these existences to the next; the soul

alone remembers them, since matter has no memory for spiritual things. The

mind alone preserves a tradition of former states. This unbroken legacy of

the past to the present, and of the present to the future, is the secret of

human genius: some have the gift of form, some the gift of number, some the

gift of harmony; these are all steps in the way to the Light. Yes, whoever

possesses one of these gifts, touches the infinite at one spot.

"The Word, of which I have here uttered a few axioms, has been distributed

over the earth, which has reduced it to powder, and infused it into its

works, its doctrines, its poetry. If the tiniest speck of it shines on a

work, you say, 'This is great; this is true; this is sublime!' And that

mere atom vibrates within you, giving you a foretaste of heaven. Thus, one

has sickness, to divide him from the world; another has solitude, bringing

him near to God; a third poetry; in short, everything that throws you in on

yourself, striking you and crushing you, is a ringing call from the Divine

Sphere.

"When a being has traced the first furrow straight, it is enough to make

the others by; one single profound thought, a voice once heard, an acute

pang, a single echo that finds the Word in you, changes your soul for ever.

Every road leads to God; hence you have many chances of finding Him if you

walk straight on. When the happy day dawns that finds you with your foot on

the road, starting on your pilgrimage, the earth knows no more of you, it

understands you no more, you are no longer in harmony with it, it rejects

you.

"Those who come to know these things, and who speak a few utterances of the

true Word, find not where to lay their head; they are hunted like wild

beasts, and often perish on the scaffold amid the rejoicing of the

assembled populace; but angels open the gates of heaven to them. So your

destination is a secret between you and God, as love is a secret between

two hearts. You are as the hidden treasure over which men trample, greedy

for gold, but not knowing that it is there.

"Your life is one of incessant activity. Each act has a purpose that tends

to God, just as when you love, your acts and thoughts are full of the

creature you love; but love and its joys, love and its sensual pleasures,

is but an imperfect image of the infinite love that unites you to the

Celestial Bridegroom. Every earthly joy is succeeded by anguish and

dissatisfaction; for love to bring no disgust in its train, death must

quench it at the fiercest, or ever you see the ashes; but God transforms

our miseries into raptures, joy is multiplied by itself, it constantly

increases, and knows no bounds.

"Thus, in the earthly life a transient love is ended by enduring

tribulations; whereas, in the spiritual life, the tribulations of a day end

in infinite joys. Your soul is for ever glad. You feel God close to you, in

you; He gives a flavor of holiness to all things, He shines in your soul,

He seals you with His sweetness, He weans you from the earth for your own

sake, and makes you care for it for His sake by suffering you to use His

power. You do, in His name, the works He inspires you to do; you wipe away

tears; you act for Him; you have nothing of your own; like Him, you love

all creatures with inextinguishable love; you long to see them all marching

towards Him, as a truly loving woman would fain see all the nations of the

earth obedient to her Beloved.

"The last life--that in which all previous lives are summed up--is the life

of prayer; in it every power is strung to the highest pitch, and its merits

will open the gates of heaven to the being made perfect. Who can make you

understand the greatness, the majesty, the power of prayer? Oh that my

voice may be as thunder in your hearts, and that it may change them! Be

now, forthwith, what you will become after trials. There are certain

privileged beings--prophets, seers, evangelists, martyrs, all who suffer

for the Word or who have declared it--these souls cross the human spheres

at a single bound, and rise at once to prayer. So, too, do those who are

consumed by the flame of faith. Be ye then such a daring pair! God accepts

such temerity; He loves those who take Him with violence, He never rejects

such as can force their way to Him. Understand this: Desire, the torrent

of will, is so potent in a man, that a single jet forcibly emitted is

enough to win anything, a single cry is often enough when uttered under the

stress of faith. Be ye one of those beings, full of force, will, and love!

Be victorious over the earth! Let the hunger and thirst for God possess you

wholly; run to Him as the thirsting hart runs to the water-brook. Desire

will give you wings; tears, the flowers of repentance, will fall like a

heavenly baptism, whence your nature will come forth purified. From the

bosom of these waters leap into prayer!

"Silence and meditation are efficacious means of entering on this road; God

always reveals Himself to the solitary and contemplative man. By this

method the necessary separation is effected between matter, which has so

long held you shrouded in darkness, and the spirit, which is born in you

and gives you light, and day will dawn in your soul. Your broken heart

receives the light which floods it; you no longer feel convictions, but

dazzling certainties. The poet has expression, the sage meditates, the

righteous man acts; but he who is on the frontier of the divine worlds

prays, and his prayer is expression, meditation, and action all in one!

Yes, his prayer contains everything, includes everything; it completes your

nature by showing you the Spirit and the Way.

"Prayer is the fair and radiant daughter of all the human virtues, the arch

connecting heaven and earth, the sweet companion that is alike the lion and

the dove; and prayer will give you the key of heaven. As pure and as bold

as innocence, as strong as all things are that are entire and single, this

fair and invincible queen rests on the material world; she has taken

possession of it; for, like the sun, she casts about it a sphere of light.

The universe belongs to him who will, who can, who knows how to pray; but

he must will, he must be able, and he must know how--in one word, he must

have power, faith, and wisdom. And, indeed, when prayer is the outcome of

so many trials, it is the consummation of all truth, of all power, of all

emotion. The offspring of the laborious, slow, and persistent development

of every natural property, and alive by the divine insufflation of the

Word, she has enchantments in her hand, she is the crown of

worship--neither material worship, which has its symbols, nor spiritual

worship, which has its formulas, but worship of the divine order.

"We do not then say prayers; prayer lights up within us, and is a faculty

which acts of itself: it acquires the vital activity which lifts it above

all forms; it links the soul to God, and you are joined to Him as the root

of a tree is joined to the earth; the elements of things flow in your

veins, and you live the life of the worlds themselves. Prayer bestows

external conviction by enabling you to penetrate the world of matter

through a cohesion of all your faculties with elementary substances; it

bestows internal conviction by evolving your very essence, and mingling it

with that of the spiritual spheres.

"To pray thus you must attain to absolute freedom from the flesh; you must

be refined in the furnace to the purity of a diamond; for that perfect

communion can only be achieved by absolute quiescence, the stilling of

every storm. Yes, prayer, literally an aspiration of the soul set wholly

free from the body, bears up every power, applying them all to the constant

and persistent union of the visible and the invisible. When you possess the

gift of praying without weariness, with love, assurance, force, and

intelligence, your spiritualized nature soon attains to power. It passes

beyond everything, like the whirlwind or the thunder, and partakes of the

nature of God. You acquire alacrity of spirit; in one instant you can be

present in every region; you are borne, like the Word itself, from one end

of the world to the other. There is a harmony--you join in it; there is a

light--you see it; there is a melody--its counterpart is in you. In that

frame you will feel your intellect expanding, growing, and its insight

reaching to prodigious distances; in fact, to the spirit, time and space

are not. Distance and duration are proportions proper to matter; and spirit

and matter have nothing in common.

"Although these things proceed in silence and stillness, without

disturbance or external emotion, everything is action in prayer; but vital

action, devoid of all substantiality, refined like the motion of worlds

into a pure and invisible force. It comes down from above like light, and

gives life to the souls that lie in its rays, as nature lies in those of

the sun. It everywhere resuscitates virtue, purifies and sanctifies action,

peoples the solitude, and gives a foretaste of eternal bliss. When once you

have known the ecstasy of the divine transport that comes of your internal

struggles, there is no more to be said; when once you have grasped the

sistrum on which to praise God, you will never lay it down. Hence the

isolation in which angelic spirits dwell and their scorn of all that

constitutes human joys.

"I say unto you, they are cut off from the number of those who must die; if

they understand their speech, they no longer understand their ideas; they

are amazed by their doings, by what is termed politics, by earthly laws and

communities; to them there are no mysteries, nothing but truth. Those who

have attained the degree at which their eyes can discern the gates of

heaven, and who, without casting a single glance behind, without expressing

a single regret, can look down upon the worlds and read their

destinies,--those, I say, are silent, and wait and endure the last

conflict; the last is the hardest, resignation is the supreme virtue. To

dwell in exile and make no complaint, to have no care for things on earth

and yet to smile, to belong to God and be left among men!

"Do you not plainly hear the voice that cries to you, 'On! on!' Often in a

celestial vision the angels descend and wrap you in song. Then you must see

them soar back to the hive without a tear, without a murmur. To murmur

would be to fail. Resignation is the fruit that ripens at the gate of

heaven. How impressive and beautiful are the calm smile, the unruffled brow

of the resigned creature! How radiant the light that adorns his face! Those

who come within his range grow better; his look is penetrating and

pathetic. He triumphs merely by his presence, more eloquent in his silence

than the prophet in his speech. He stands alert like a faithful dog

listening for his master.

"Stronger than love, more eager than hope, greater than faith, Resignation

is the adorable maiden who, prone on the earth, clings for an instant to

the palm she has won by leaving the print of her pure white feet; and when

she is no more, men come in crowds and say, 'Behold!' God preserves her

there as an image, and at her feet creep all the shapes and species of

animal life seeking their way. Now and again she shakes and sheds the light

that emanates from her hair, and we see; she speaks, and we listen; and all

say to one another, 'A miracle!'

"Often she triumphs in the name of God; men in their terror deny her and

put her to death; she lays down her sword and smiles at the stake after

saving the nations!

"How many pardoned angels have stepped from martyrdom to heaven! Sinai and

Golgotha are not here nor there. The angel is crucified everywhere, and in

every sphere. Sighs go up to God from every world. The earth on which we

live is one ear of the harvest; humanity is but a species in the vast field

where flowers are grown for heaven.

"In short, God is everywhere the same, and it is easy everywhere to go to

Him by prayer."

After these words, falling as from the lips of a second Hagar in the

desert, and stirring the souls they pierced like the spears shot by the

fiery word of Isaiah, the Being was silent to collect some little remaining

strength. Neither Wilfrid nor Minna dared to speak. Then on a sudden HE sat

up to die.

"Soul of the universe, oh God, whom I love for Thyself! Thou, Judge and

Father, gauge a fervor that knows no limit but Thine infinite goodness!

Impart to me Thine essence and Thy faculties, that I may be more truly

Thine! Take me, that I may no longer be my own. If I am not duly purified,

cast me back into the furnace. If I am not finely moulded, let me be made

into some useful ploughshare or victorious sword. Grant me some glorious

martyrdom to proclaim Thy word. Even if Thou reject me, I will bless Thy

justice. If my exceeding love may win in a moment what hard and patient

labor may not obtain, snatch me up in Thy chariot of fire! Whether Thou

shalt grant me to triumph or to suffer again, blessed be Thou! But if I

suffer for Thee, is not that a triumph! Take me--seize, snatch, drag me

away! Or, if Thou wilt, reject me! Thou art He whom I worship, and who can

do no wrong.--Ah!" he cried after a pause, "the bonds are breaking. Pure

spirits, holy throng, come forth from the depths, fly over the surface of

the luminous flood! The hour has struck, come, gather round me. We will

sing at the gates of the sanctuary, our chants shall disperse the last

lingering clouds. We will unite to hail the morn of everlasting day. Behold

the dawn of the true Light! Why cannot I take my friends with

me?--Farewell, poor earth, farewell!"

VII

THE ASSUMPTION

This last hymn was not uttered in words, nor expressed by gestures, nor by

any of the signs which serve men as a means of communicating their

thoughts, but as the soul speaks to itself; for, at the moment when

Seraphita was revealed in her true nature, her ideas were no longer

enslaved to human language. The vehemence of her last prayer had broken the

bonds. Like a white dove, the soul hovered for a moment above this body, of

which the exhausted materials were about to dissever.

The aspiration of this soul to heaven was so infectious, that Wilfrid and

Minna failed to discern death as they saw the radiant spark of life.

They had fallen on their knees when Seraphitus had turned to the dawn, and

they were inspired by his ecstasy.

The fear of the Lord, who creates man anew and purges him of his dross,

consumed their hearts. Their eyes were closed to the things of the earth,

and opened to the glories of heaven.

Though surprised by the trembling before God which overcame some of those

seers known to men as prophets, they still trembled, like them, when they

found themselves within the circle where the glory of the Spirit was

shining.

Then the veil of the flesh, which had hitherto hidden him from them,

insensibly faded away, revealing the divine substance. They were left in

the twilight of the dawn, whose pale light prepared them to see the true

light, and to hear the living word without dying of it.

In this condition they both began to understand the immeasurable distances

that divide the things of earth from the things of heaven.

The life on whose brink they stood, trembling and dazzled in a close

embrace, as two children take refuge side by side to gaze at a

conflagration--that Life gave no hold to the senses. The Spirit was above

them; it shed fragrance without odor, and melody without the help of sound;

here, where they knelt, there were neither surfaces, nor angles, nor

atmosphere. They dared no longer question him nor gaze on him, but remained

under his shadow, as under the burning rays of the tropical sun we dare not

raise our eyes for fear of being blinded.

They felt themselves near to him, though they could not tell by what means

they thus found themselves, as in a dream, on the border line of the

visible and the invisible, nor how they had ceased to see the visible and

perceived the invisible.

They said to themselves, "If he should touch us, we shall die!" But the

Spirit was in the infinite, and they did not know that in the infinite time

and space are not, that they were divided from him by gulfs, though

apparently so near. Their souls not being prepared to receive a complete

knowledge of the faculties of that life, they only perceived it darkly,

apprehending it according to their weakness.

Otherwise, when the Living Word rang forth, of which the distant sound fell

on their ear, its meaning entering into their soul as life enters into a

body, a single tone of that Word would have swept them away, as a whirl of

fire seizes a straw.

Thus they beheld only what their nature, upheld by the power of the Spirit,

allowed them to see; they heard only so much as they were able to hear.

Still, in spite of these mitigations, they shuddered as they heard the

voice of the suffering soul, the hymn of the Spirit awaiting life, and

crying out for it. That cry froze the very marrow in their bones.

The Spirit knocked at the sacred gate.

"What wilt thou?" asked a choir, whose voice rang through all the worlds.

"To go to God."

"Hast thou conquered?"

"I have conquered the flesh by abstinence; I have vanquished false speech

by silence; I have vanquished false knowledge by humility; I have

vanquished pride by charity; I have vanquished the earth by love; I have

paid my tribute of suffering; I am purified by burning for the faith; I

have striven for life by prayer; I wait adoring, and I am resigned."

But no reply came.

"The Lord be praised!" said the Spirit, believing himself rejected. His

tears flowed, and fell in dew on the kneeling witnesses, who shuddered at

the judgments of God.

On a sudden, the trumpets sounded for the victory of the Angel in this last

test; their music filled space, like a sound met by an echo; it rang

through it, making the universe tremble. Wilfrid and Minna felt the world

shrink under their feet. They shivered, shaken by the terrors of

apprehending the mystery that was to be accomplished.

There was, in fact, a vast stir, as though the eternal legions were forming

to march, and gathering in spiral order. The worlds spun round, like clouds

swept away by a mad whirlwind. It was all in a moment. The veils were rent;

they saw far above them, as it were, a star immeasurably brighter than the

brightest star in the skies; it fell from its place like a thunderbolt,

still flashing like the lightning, paling in its flight all that they had

ever hitherto thought to be light.

This was the messenger bearing the good tidings, and the plume in his

helmet was a flame of life. He left behind him a wake, filled up at once by

the waves of the luminous flood he passed through.

He bore a palm and a sword; with the palm he touched the Spirit, and it was

transfigured; its white wings spread without a sound.

At the communication of the Light, which changed the Spirit into a seraph,

the garb of heavenly armor that clothed its glorious form, shed such

radiance that the two seers were blinded. And, like the three apostles to

whose sight Jesus appeared, Wilfrid and Minna were conscious of the burden

of their bodies, which hindered them from complete and unclouded intuition

of the Word and the True Life.

They saw the nakedness of their souls, and could measure their lack of

brightness by comparison with the halo of the seraph, in which they stood

as a shameful spot. They felt an ardent desire to rush back into the mire

of the universe, to endure trial there, so as to be able some day to utter

at the sacred gate the answer spoken by the glorified Spirit.

That seraph knelt down by the gate of the sanctuary, which he could at last

see face to face, and said, pointing to them:

"Grant them to see more clearly. They will love the Lord, and proclaim His

Word."

In answer to this prayer, a veil fell. Whether the unknown power that laid

a hand on the two seers did for a moment annihilate their physical bodies,

or whether it released their spirit to soar free, they were aware of a

separation in themselves of the pure from the impure.

Then the seraph's tears rose round them in the form of a vapor which hid

the lower worlds from their eyes, and wrapped them round and carried them

away, and gave them oblivion of earthly meanings, and the power of

understanding the sense of divine things. The True Light appeared; it shed

light on all creation, which, to them, looked barren indeed when they saw

the source whence the worlds, earthly, spiritual, and divine, derive

motion.

Each world had a centre to which tended every atom of the sphere; these

worlds were themselves each an atom tending to the centre of their species.

Each species had its centre in the vast celestial region that is in

communion with the inexhaustible and flaming _motor power of all that

exists_. Thus, from the most vast to the smallest of the worlds, and from

the smallest sphere to the minutest atom of the creation that constitutes

it, each thing was an individual, and yet all was one.

What, then, was the purpose of the Being, immutable in Essence and Faculty,

but able to communicate them without loss, able to manifest them as

phenomena without separating them from Himself, and causing everything

outside Himself to be a creation immutable in its essence and mutable in

its form? The two guests bidden to this high festival could only see the

order and arrangement of beings, and wonder at their immediate ends. None

but angels could go beyond that, and know the means and understand the

purpose.

But that which those two chosen ones could contemplate, and of which they

carried away the evidence to be a light to their souls for ever after, was

the certainty of the action of worlds and beings, and a knowledge of the

effort with which they all tend to a final result. They heard the various

parts of the infinite forming a living melody; and at each beat, when the

concord made itself felt as a deep expiration, the worlds, carried on by

this unanimous motion, bowed to the Omnipotent One, who in His

unapproachable centre made all things issue from Him and return to Him.

This ceaseless alternation of voices and silence seemed to be the rhythm of

the holy hymn that was echoed and sustained from age to age.

Wilfrid and Minna now understood some of the mysterious words of the being

who on earth had appeared to them under the form which was intelligible to

each--Seraphitus to one, Seraphita to the other--seeing that here all was

homogeneous. Light gave birth to melody, and melody to light; colors were

both light and melody; motion was number endowed by the Word; in short,

everything was at once sonorous, diaphanous, and mobile; so that,

everything existing in everything else, extension knew no limits, and the

angels could traverse it everywhere to the utmost depths of the infinite.

They saw then how puerile were the human sciences of which they had heard.

Before them lay a view without any horizon, an abyss into which ardent

craving invited them to plunge; but burdened with their hapless bodies,

they had the desire without the power.

The seraph lightly spread his wings to take his flight, and did not look

back at them--he had nothing now in common with the earth.

He sprang upwards; the vast span of his dazzling pinions covered the two

seers like a beneficent shade, allowing them to raise their eyes and see

him borne away in his glory escorted by the rejoicing archangel. He mounted

like a beaming sun rising from the bosom of the waters; but, more happy he

than the day star, and destined to more glorious ends, he was not bound,

like inferior creatures, to a circular orbit; he followed the direct line

of the infinite, tending undeviatingly to the central one, to be lost there

in life eternal, and to absorb into his faculties and into his essence the

power of rejoicing through love and the gift of comprehending through

wisdom.

The spectacle that was then suddenly unveiled to the eyes of the two seers

overpowered them by its vastness, for they felt like atoms whose smallness

was comparable only to the minutest fraction which infinite divisibility

allows man to conceive of, brought face to face with the infinitely

numerous which God alone can contemplate as He contemplates Himself.

What humiliation and what greatness in those two points, strength and love,

which the seraph's first desire had placed as two links uniting the

immensity of the inferior universe to the immensity of the superior

universe! They understood the invisible bonds by which material worlds are

attached to the spiritual worlds. As they recalled the stupendous efforts

of the greatest human minds, they discerned the principle of melody as they

heard the songs of heaven which gave them all the sensations of color,

perfume, and thought, and reminded them of the innumerable details of all

the creations, as an earthly song can revive the slenderest memories of

love.

Strung by the excessive exaltation of their faculties to a pitch for which

there is no word in any language, for a moment they were suffered to glance

into the divine sphere. There all was gladness. Myriads of angels winged

their way with one consent and without confusion, all alike but all

different, as simple as the wild rose, as vast as worlds.

Wilfrid and Minna did not see them come nor go; they suddenly pervaded the

infinite with their presence, as stars appear in the unfathomable ether.

The blaze of all their diadems flashed into light in space, as the heavenly

fire is lighted when the day rises among mountains. Waves of light fell

from their hair, and their movements gave rise to undulating throbs like

the dancing waves of a phosphorescent sea.

The two seers could discern the seraph as a darker object amid deathless

legions, whose wings were as the mighty plumage of a forest swept by the

breeze. And then, as though all the arrows of a quiver were shot off at

once, the spirits dispelled with a breath every vestige of his former

shape; as the seraph mounted higher he was purified, and ere long he was no

more than a filmy image of what they had seen when he was first

transfigured--lines of fire with no shadow. Up and up, receiving a fresh

gift at each circle, while the sign of his election was transmitted to the

highest heaven, whither he mounted purer and purer.

None of the voices ceased; the hymn spread in all its modes:

"Hail to him who rises to life! Come, flower of the worlds, diamond passed

through the fire of affliction, pearl without spot, desire without flesh,

new link between earth and heaven, be thou Light! Conquering spirit, queen

of the world, fly to take thy crown; victorious over the earth, receive thy

diadem! Be one of us!"

The angel's virtues reappeared in all their beauty. His first longing for

heaven was seen in the grace of tender infancy. His deeds adorned him with

brightness like constellations; his acts of faith blazed like the hyacinth

of the skies, the hue of the stars. Charity decked him with oriental

pearls, treasured tears. Divine love bowered him in roses, and his pious

resignation by its whiteness divested him of every trace of earthliness.

Soon, to their eyes, he was no more than a speck of flame, growing more and

more intense, its motion lost in the melodious acclamations that hailed his

arrival in heaven.

The celestial voices made the two exiles weep.

Suddenly the silence of death spread like a solemn veil from the highest to

the lowest sphere, throwing Wilfrid and Minna into unutterable expectancy.

At that instant the seraph was lost in the heart of the sanctuary, where he

received the gift of eternal life.

Then they were aware of an impulse of intense adoration, which filled them

with rapture mingled with awe. They felt that every being had fallen

prostrate in the divine spheres, in the spiritual spheres, and in the

worlds of darkness. The angels bent the knee to do honor to his glory, the

spirits bent the knee to testify to their eagerness, and in the abyss all

knelt, shuddering with awe.

A mighty shout of joy broke out, as a choked spring breaks forth again,

tossing up its thousands of flower-like jets, mirroring the sun which turns

the sparkling drops to diamond and pearl, at the instant when the seraph

emerged, a blaze of light, crying:

"Eternal! Eternal! Eternal!"

The worlds heard him and acknowledged him; he became one with them as God

is, and took possession of the infinite.

The seven divine worlds were aroused by his voice and answered him.

At this instant there was a great rush, as if whole stars were purified and

went up in dazzling glory to be eternal. Perhaps the seraph's first duty

was to call all creations filled with the Word to come to God.

But the hallelujah was already dying away in the ears of Wilfrid and Minna,

like the last waves of dying music. The glories of heaven were already

vanishing, like the hues of a setting sun amid curtains of purple and gold.

Death and impurity were repossessing themselves of their prey.

* * * * *

As they resumed the bondage of the flesh from which their spirit had for a

moment been released by a sublime trance, the two mortals felt as on

awakening in the morning from a night of splendid dreams, of which

reminiscences float in the brain, though the senses have no knowledge of

them, and human language would fail to express them. The blackness of the

limbo into which they fell was the sphere where the sun of visible worlds

shines.

"We must go down again," said Wilfrid to Minna.

"We will do as he bids us," replied she. "Having seen the worlds moving on

towards God, we know the right way.--Our starry diadems are above!"

They fell into the abyss, into the dust of the lower worlds, and suddenly

saw the earth as it were a crypt, of which the prospect was made clear to

them by the light they brought back in their souls, for it still wrapped

them in a halo, and through it they still vaguely heard the vanishing

harmonies of heaven. This was the spectacle which of old fell on the mind's

eye of the prophets. Ministers of various religions, all calling themselves

true, kings consecrated by force and fear, warriors and conquerors sharing

the nations, learned men and rich lording it over a refractory and

suffering populace whom they trampled under foot,--these were all attended

by their followers and their women, all were clad in robes of gold, silver

and azure, covered with pearls and gems torn from the bowels of the earth

or from the depths of the sea by the perennial toil of sweating and

blaspheming humanity. But in the eyes of the exiles this wealth and

splendor, harvested with blood, were but filthy rags.

"What do ye here in motionless ranks?" asked Wilfrid.

They made no answer.

"What do ye here in motionless ranks?"

But they made no answer.

Wilfrid laid his hands on them and shouted:

"What do ye here in motionless ranks?"

By a common impulse they all opened their robes and showed him their

bodies, dried up, eaten by worms, corrupt, falling to dust, and consumed by

horrible diseases. "Ye lead the nations to death," said Wilfrid; "ye have

defiled the earth, perverted the Word, prostituted justice. Ye have eaten

the herb of the field, and now ye would kill the lambs! Do ye think that

there is justification in showing your wounds? I shall warn those of my

brethren who still can hear the Voice, that they may slake their thirst at

the springs that you have hidden."

"Let us save our strength for prayer," said Minna. "It is not your mission

to be a prophet, nor a redeemer, nor an evangelist. We are as yet only on

the margin of the lowest sphere; let us strive to cleave through space on

the pinions of prayer."

"You are my sole love!"

"You are my sole strength!"

"We have had a glimpse of the higher mysteries; we are, each to the other,

the only creatures here below with whom joy and grief are conceivable. Come

then, we will pray; we know the road, we will walk in it."

"Give me your hand," said the girl. "If we always walk together, the path

will seem less rough and not so long."

"Only with you," said the young man, "could I traverse that vast desert

without allowing myself to repine."

"And we will go to heaven together!" said she.

The clouds fell, forming a dark canopy. Suddenly the lovers found

themselves kneeling by a dead body, which old David was protecting from

prying curiosity, and insisted on burying with his own hands.

Outside, the first summer of the nineteenth century was in all its glory;

the lovers fancied they could hear a voice in the sunbeams. They breathed

heavenly perfume from the new-born flowers, and said as they took each

other by the hand:

"The vast ocean that gleams out there is an image of that we saw above!"

"Whither are you going?" asked Pastor Becker.

"We mean to go to God," said they. "Come with us, father."

GENEVA AND PARIS,

_December 1833--November 1835_.

LOUIS LAMBERT

DEDICATION:

"_Et nunc et semper dilectae dicatum._"

Louis Lambert was born in 1797 at Montoire, a little town in the Vendomois,

where his father owned a tannery of no great magnitude, and intended that

his son should succeed him; but his precocious bent for study modified the

paternal decision. For, indeed, the tanner and his wife adored Louis, their

only child, and never contradicted him in anything.

At the age of five Louis had begun by reading the Old and New Testaments;

and these two Books, including so many books, had sealed his fate. Could

that childish imagination understand the mystical depths of the Scriptures?

Could it so early follow the flight of the Holy Spirit across the worlds?

Or was it merely attracted by the romantic touches which abound in those

Oriental poems! Our narrative will answer these questions to some readers.

One thing resulted from this first reading of the Bible: Louis went all

over Montoire begging for books, and he obtained them by those winning ways

peculiar to children, which no one can resist. While devoting himself to

these studies under no sort of guidance, he reached the age of ten.

At that period substitutes for the army were scarce; rich families secured

them long beforehand to have them ready when the lots were drawn. The poor

tanner's modest fortune did not allow of their purchasing a substitute for

their son, and they saw no means allowed by law for evading the

conscription but that of making him a priest; so, in 1807, they sent him to

his maternal uncle, the parish priest of Mer, another small town on the

Loire, not far from Blois. This arrangement at once satisfied Louis'

passion for knowledge, and his parents' wish not to expose him to the

dreadful chances of war; and, indeed, his taste for study and precocious

intelligence gave grounds for hoping that he might rise to high fortunes in

the Church.

After remaining for about three years with his uncle, an old and not

uncultured Oratorian, Louis left him early in 1811 to enter the college at

Vendome, where he was maintained at the cost of Madame de Stael.

Lambert owed the favor and patronage of this celebrated lady to chance, or

shall we not say to Providence, who can smooth the path of forlorn genius?

To us, indeed, who do not see below the surface of human things, such

vicissitudes, of which we find many examples in the lives of great men,

appear to be merely the result of physical phenomena; to most biographers

the head of a man of genius rises above the herd as some noble plant in the

fields attracts the eye of a botanist in its splendor. This comparison may

well be applied to Louis Lambert's adventure; he was accustomed to spend

the time allowed him by his uncle for holidays at his father's house; but

instead of indulging, after the manner of schoolboys, in the sweets of the

delightful _far niente_ that tempts us at every age, he set out every

morning with part of a loaf and his books, and went to read and meditate in

the woods, to escape his mother's remonstrances, for she believed such

persistent study to be injurious. How admirable is a mother's instinct!

From that time reading was in Louis a sort of appetite which nothing could

satisfy; he devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on

religious works, history, philosophy, and physics. He has told me that he

found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other

books, and I readily believed him. What scholar has not many a time found

pleasure in seeking the probable meaning of some unknown word? The analysis

of a word, its physiognomy and history, would be to Lambert matter for long

dreaming. But these were not the instinctive dreams by which a boy

accustoms himself to the phenomena of life, steels himself to every moral

or physical perception--an involuntary education which subsequently brings

forth fruit both in the understanding and character of a man; no, Louis

mastered the facts, and he accounted for them after seeking out both the

principle and the end with the mother wit of a savage. Indeed, from the age

of fourteen, by one of those startling freaks in which nature sometimes

indulges, and which proved how anomalous was his temperament, he would

utter quite simply ideas of which the depth was not revealed to me till a

long time after.

"Often," he has said to me when speaking of his studies, "often have I made

the most delightful voyage, floating on a word down the abyss of the past,

like an insect embarked on a blade of grass tossing on the ripples of a

stream. Starting from Greece, I would get to Rome, and traverse the whole

extent of modern ages. What a fine book might be written of the life and

adventures of a word! It has, of course, received various stamps from the

occasions on which it has served its purpose; it has conveyed different

ideas in different places; but is it not still grander to think of it under

the three aspects of soul, body, and motion? Merely to regard it in the

abstract, apart from its functions, its effects, and its influence, is

enough to cast one into an ocean of meditations? Are not most words colored

by the idea they represent? Then, to whose genius are they due? If it takes

great intelligence to create a word, how old may human speech be? The

combination of letters, their shapes, and the look they give to the word,

are the exact reflection, in accordance with the character of each nation,

of the unknown beings whose traces survive in us.

"Who can philosophically explain the transition from sensation to thought,

from thought to word, from the word to its hieroglyphic presentment, from

hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to written language, of

which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of images, classified by

rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not

the ancient mode of representing human ideas as embodied in the forms of

animals that gave rise to the shapes of the first signs used in the East

for writing down language? Then has it not left its traces by tradition on

our modern languages, which have all seized some remnant of the primitive

speech of nations, a majestic and solemn tongue whose grandeur and

solemnity decrease as communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in

the Hebrew Bible, and still are noble in Greece, but grow weaker under the

progress of successive phases of civilization?

"Is it to this time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried

in every human word? In the word _True_ do we not discern a certain

imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a

vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all things? The

syllable seems to me singularly crisp and fresh.

"I chose the formula of an abstract idea on purpose, not wishing to

illustrate the case by a word which should make it too obvious to the

apprehension, as the word _Flight_ for instance, which is a direct appeal

to the senses.

"But is it not so with every root word? They all are stamped with a living

power that comes from the soul, and which they restore to the soul through

the mysterious and wonderful action and reaction between thought and

speech. Might we not speak of it as a lover who finds on his mistress' lips

as much love as he gives? Thus, by their mere physiognomy, words call to

life in our brain the beings which they serve to clothe. Like all beings,

there is but one place where their properties are at full liberty to act

and develop. But the subject demands a science to itself perhaps!"

And he would shrug his shoulders as much as to say, "But we are too high

and too low!"