Yeast: a Problem Part 39

'In what sense, now, is that a possession? Do you possess the sun because you see it? Did Herschel create Ura.n.u.s by discovering it; or even increase, by an atom, its attraction on one particle of his own body?"

'Whither is all this tending?'

'Hither. Tregarva does not possess his Father and his Lord; he is possessed by them.'

'But he would say--and I should believe him--that he has seen and known them, not with his bodily eyes, but with his soul, heart, imagination--call it what you will. All I know is, that between him and me there is a great gulf fixed.'

'What! seen and known them utterly? comprehended them? Are they not infinite, incomprehensible? Can the less comprehend the greater?'

'He knows, at least, enough of them to make him what I am not.'

'That is, he knows something of them. And may not you know something of them also?--enough to make you what he is not?'

Lancelot shook his head in silence.

'Suppose that you had met and spoken with your father, and loved him when you saw him, and yet were not aware of the relation in which you stood to him, still you would know him?'

'Not the most important thing of all--that he was my father.'

'Is that the most important thing? Is it not more important that he should know that you were his son? That he should support, guide, educate you, even though unseen? Do you not know that some one has been doing that?'

'That I have been supported, guided, educated, I know full well; but by whom I know not. And I know, too, that I have been punished.

And therefore--therefore I cannot free the thought of a Him--of a Person--only of a Destiny, of Laws and Powers, which have no faces wherewith to frown awful wrath upon me! If it be a Person who has been leading me, I must go mad, or know that He has forgiven!'

'I conceive that it is He, and not punishment which you fear?'

Lancelot was silent a moment. . . . 'Yes. He, and not h.e.l.l at all, is what I fear. He can inflict no punishment on me worse than the inner h.e.l.l which I have felt already, many and many a time.'

'Bona verba! That is an awful thing to say: but better this extreme than the other. . . . And you would--what?'

'Be pardoned.'

'If He loves you, He has pardoned you already.'

'How do I know that He loves me?'

'How does Tregarva?'

'He is a righteous man, and I--'

'Am a sinner. He would, and rightly, call himself the same.'

'But he knows that G.o.d loves him--that he is G.o.d's child.'

'So, then, G.o.d did not love him till he caused G.o.d to love him, by knowing that He loved him? He was not G.o.d's child till he made himself one, by believing that he was one when as yet he was not? I appeal to common sense and logic . . . It was revealed to Tregarva that G.o.d had been loving him while he was yet a bad man. If He loved him, in spite of his sin, why should He not have loved you?'

'If He had loved me, would He have left me in ignorance of Himself?

For if He be, to know Him is the highest good.'

'Had he left Tregarva in ignorance of Himself?'

'No. . . . Certainly, Tregarva spoke of his conversion as of a turning to one of whom he had known all along, and disregarded.'

'Then do you turn like him, to Him whom you have known all along, and disregarded.'

'I?'

'Yes--you! If half I have heard and seen of you be true, He has been telling you more, and not less, of Himself than He does to most men. You, for aught I know, may know more of Him than Tregarva does. The gulf between you and him is this: he has obeyed what he knew--and you have not.' . . .

Lancelot paused a moment, then--

'No!--do not cheat me! You said once that you were a churchman.'

'So I am. A Catholic of the Catholics. What then?'

'Who is He to whom you ask me to turn? You talk to me of Him as my Father; but you talk of Him to men of your own creed as The Father.

You have mysterious dogmas of a Three in One. I know them . . . I have admired them. In all their forms--in the Vedas, in the Neo- Platonists, in Jacob Boehmen, in your Catholic creeds, in Coleridge, and the Germans from whom he borrowed, I have looked at them, and found in them beautiful phantasms of philosophy, . . . all but scientific necessities; . . . but--'

'But what?'

'I do not want cold abstract necessities of logic: I want living practical facts. If those mysterious dogmas speak of real and necessary properties of His being, they must be necessarily interwoven in practice with His revelation of Himself?'

'Most true. But how would you have Him unveil Himself?'

'By unveiling Himself.'

'What? To your simple intuition? That was Semele's ambition. . . .

You recollect the end of that myth. You recollect, too, as you have read the Neo-Platonists, the result of their similar attempt.'

'Idolatry and magic.'

'True; and yet, such is the ambition of man, you who were just now envying Tregarva, are already longing to climb even higher than Saint Theresa.'

'I do not often indulge in such an ambition. But I have read in your Schoolmen tales of a Beatific Vision; how that the highest good for man was to see G.o.d.'

'And did you believe that?'

'One cannot believe the impossible--only regret its impossibility.'

'Impossibility? You can only see the Uncreate in the Create--the Infinite in the Finite--the absolute good in that which is like the good. Does Tregarva pretend to more? He sees G.o.d in His own thoughts and consciousnesses, and in the events of the world around him, imaged in the mirror of his own mind. Is your mirror, then, so much narrower than his?'

'I have none. I see but myself, and the world, and far above them, a dim awful Unity, which is but a notion.'

'Fool!--and slow of heart to believe! Where else would you see Him but in yourself and in the world? They are all things cognisable to you. Where else, but everywhere, would you see Him whom no man hath seen, or can see?'

'When He shows Himself to me in them, then I may see Him. But now-- '

'You have seen Him; and because you do not know the name of what you see--or rather will not acknowledge it--you fancy that it is not there.'