k it is hard to see
why: it is simply because he was a man as we are. Had he been other than
a man, had truth been revealed to him from the beginning, had he never
fought, had he never failed, do you think that he would have held the
love of men as he does? I fear, had it been so, this people would have
lacked a soul.

His disciples left him, and he was alone. He went away to a great grove
of trees near by--those beautiful groves of mango and palm and fig that
are the delight of the heart in that land of burning, flooding
sunshine--and there he slept, defeated, discredited, and abandoned; and
there the truth came to him.

There is a story of how a young wife, coming to offer her little
offerings to the spirit of the great fig-tree, saw him, and took him for
the spirit, so beautiful was his face as he rose.

There are spirits in all the great trees, in all the rivers, in all the
hills--very beautiful, very peaceful, loving calm and rest.

The woman thought he was the spirit come down to accept her offering,
and she gave it to him--the cup of curdled milk--in fear and trembling,
and he took it. The woman went away again full of hope and joy, and the
prince remained in the grove. He lived there for forty-nine days, we
are told, under the great fig-tree by the river. And the fig-tree has
become sacred for ever because he sat there and because there he found
the truth. We are told of it all in wonderful trope and imagery--of his
last fight over sin, and of his victory.

There the truth came to him at last out of his own heart. He had sought
for it in men and in Nature, and found it not, and, lo! it was in his
own heart.

When his eyes were cleared of imaginings, and his body purified by
temperance, then at last he saw, down in his own soul, what he had
sought the world over for. Every man carries it there. It is never dead,
but lives with our life, this light that we seek. We darken it, and turn
our faces from it to follow strange lights, to pursue vague glimmers in
the dark, and there, all the time, is the light in each man's own heart.
Darkened it may be, crusted over with our ignorance and sin, but never
dead, never dead, always burning brightly for us when we care to seek
for it.

The truth for each man is in his own soul. And so it came at last, and
he who saw the light went forth and preached it to all the world. He
lived a long life, a life full of wonderful teaching, of still more
marvellous example. All the