of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver,
because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the
active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love,
there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and
special forms of service to justify a priesthood. "God is God," he
whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of
a sufficient creed. God is his own definition; there is no other
definition of God. Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments
whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal
troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite. It were as reasonable
to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree. He had imagined God
as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence
of leadership, a captain like the sun. The vision of his drug-quickened
mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible. Of that he was
now sure. He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible
likeness. He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all
such presentations were false. Just as much and just as little was God
the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the
distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees
now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky. These riddles of
the profundities were beyond the compass of common living. They were
beyond the needs of common living. He was but a little earth parasite,
sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal
functions on a minor planet. Within the compass of terrestrial living
God showed himself in its own terms. The life of man on earth was a
struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect
of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and
within. So long as men were men, so would they see God. Only when they
reached the crest could they begin to look beyond. So we knew God, so
God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were
finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to
our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained
inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining
beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and
pain and pleasure.

(12)

Serope's mind was saturated as it had never been before by his se