We stood upon the deck of the great trans-Atlantic steamer and our
color-thirsty eyes drank in the rich scene of the cliffs and hills of
Ireland, rising above a calm sea under a sky heavy with rain. Dark
grayish-purple, light gray and white rain clouds to one side, above us
a clear limpid blue, a short fragment of a rainbow rising out of the
light emerald-green sea, and stretching straight across the faded brown
and dull green land with the little white houses, on to the
blackish-gray cloud which flowed out into mist and against which the
bright colors shone dazzlingly. Thousands of white gulls round about
the ship, like a whirling, living snow flurry, glittering in the bright
sunlight and contrasting sharply with the dark background of clouds -
screaming and screeching wildly and ceaselessly.
"The sign of the covenant," said I, pointing to the rainbow.
"Do you really believe, Vico, that God gives such signs to men?"
"What do you mean by 'God,' Elsje?"
Elsje looked at me with pensive wonder.
"Do you then only believe in Christ and not in God?"
"When I employ a word I want it to mean something. After many years of
thought and observation I am beginning to mean something more or less
distinct when I say Christ. Why? Because I have obtained so many signs
of Christ, outward and inward, that I could form a fixed idea from them
- not a picture, not an image, but an idea, what the professors call a
hypothesis, and in which one may believe as every scholar may believe
in his hypothesis, without absolute certainty, but with an
ever-increasing degree of probability, so that one can make predictions
and see them confirmed by experience. This is the faith that poets and
scholars and originals and herd-men are all equally in need of."
"And does God not give such signs then?" asked Elsie.
"Patience, child! first come the signs and only then do the conclusions
follow. I behold here a glorious, beneficent and comforting spectacle.
That is a sign. But of what and of whom? Of a higher being than Christ?
Surely. For earth and sun, that made this sign, are more than humanity.
But our inward perceptibility experiences emotions which point to a
supreme Being, the Almighty, who created the sun and the earth and all
the stars, on whom all we know is dependent and to whom all is subject.
No matter what we think we must always arrive at such a Being. It is
impossible not to - whether we call it Nature or God or something else,
or better still give it no name."
"Yes," said Elsie; "but for me again God, just like Christ, is a
living, feeling, loving being. And Nature, sun, earth - all that is not
living and feeling, is it -?"
"Dear Elsie, only in the beginning of this century, before the
professors had yet thought out their impossible hypothesis of a dead
matter and a soulless Nature, there was a poet who in a few words set
forth the wisdom which the professors have forgotten and which they
will have to remember again, before we have gone half a century
further. This poet was named Shelley, and when he was not older than
twenty, he wrote:
'Of all this varied and eternal world
Soul is the only element...
'The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight