From such a paralysis of thought and life two beliefs have saved me.

First, it may be confessed, came the belief in the Spirit of God, the thought of inner holiness, not born from any contemplation of the world around, which seems indeed to point to far different ideals. Yet as true and truer than the bewildering example of nature is the inner voice which speaks, after the wind and storm, in the silent solitudes of the soul. That this voice exists and is heard can admit of no tangible demonstration; each must speak for himself; but experience forbids me to doubt that there is something which contradicts the seduction of appetite, something which calls, as it were, a flush to the face of the soul at the thought of triumphs of sense, a voice that without being derisive or harsh, yet has a terrible and instantaneous severity; and wields a mental scourge, the blows of which are no less fearful to receive because they are accompanied with no physical disaster. To recognise this voice as the very voice and word of the Father to sentient souls, is the inevitable result of experience and thought.

Then came the triumphant belief, weak at first, but taking slow shape, that the attitude of the soul to its Maker can be something more than a distant reverence, an overpowering awe, a humble worship; the belief, the certainty that it can be, as it were, a personal link—that we can indeed hold converse with God, speak with Him, call upon Him, put to use a human phrase, our hand in His, only desiring to be led according to His will.

Then came the further step; after some study of the systems of other teachers of humanity, after a desire to find in the great redeemers of mankind, in Buddha, Socrates, Mahomet, Confucius, Shakespeare, the secret of self-conquest, of reconciliation, the knowledge slowly dawns upon the mind that in Jesus of Galilee alone we are in the presence of something which enlightens man not from within but from without. The other great teachers of humanity seem to have looked upon the world and into their own hearts, and deduced from thence, by flashes of indescribable genius, some order out of the chaos, some wise and temperate scheme, but with Jesus—though I long resisted the conviction—it is different. He comes, not as a man speaking by observation and thought, but as a visitant from some secret place, who knows the truth rather than guesses at it. I need not say that his reporters, the Gospel writers, had but an imperfect conception of His majesty. His ineffable greatness—it could not well be otherwise; the mystery rather is that with such simple views of life, such elementary conceptions of the scheme of things, they yet gave so much of the stupendous truth, and revealed Jesus in his words and acts as the Divine Man, who spoke to man not by spiritual influences but by the very authentic utterance of God. Such teaching as the parables, such scenes as the raising of Lazarus, or the midday talk by the wayside well of Sychar, emerge from all art and history with a dignity that lays no claim to the majesty that they win; and as the tragedy darkens and thickens to its close, such scenes as the trial, recorded by St. John, and the sacred death, bring home to the mind the fact that no mere humanity could bear itself with such gentle and tranquil dignity, such intense and yet such unselfish suffering as were manifested in the Son of Man.

And so, as the traveller goes out and wanders through the cities of men, among stately palaces, among the glories of art, or climbs among the aching solitudes of lonely mountains, or feasts his eyes upon green isles floating in sapphire seas, and returns to find that the old strait dwelling-place, the simple duties of life, the familiar friends, homely though they be, are the true anchors of the spirit; so, after a weary pilgrimage, the soul comes back, with glad relief, with wistful tenderness, to the old beliefs of childhood, which, in its pride and stubbornness, it cast aside, and rejected as weak and inadequate and faded; finds after infinite trouble and weariness that it has but learnt afresh what it knew; and that though the wanderer has ransacked the world, digged and drunk strange waters, trafficked for foreign merchandise, yet the Pearl of Price, the White Stone is hidden after all in his own garden-ground, and inscribed with his own new name.

---