what he has seen and heard there. He gives the preacher credit for
having said a great deal that was true, and in the manner most
convincing to the already convinced who were assembled to hear him. For
his own part, he declares, Nature is his church, as she has been his
teacher; and he surrenders himself with a joyful sense of relief to the
religious influences of the solitude and the night: his heart glowing
with the consciousness of the unseen Love which everywhere appeals to
him in the visible power of the Creator. Suddenly a mighty spectacle
unfolds itself. The rain and wind have ceased. The barricade of cloud
which veiled the moon's passage up the western sky has sunk riven at her
feet. She herself shines forth in unbroken radiance, and a double lunar
rainbow, in all its spectral grandeur, spans the vault of heaven. There
is a sense as of a heavenly presence about to emerge upon the arc. Then
the rapture overflows the spectator's brain, and the Master, arrayed in
a serpentining garment, appears in the path before him.

But the Face is averted. "Has he despised the friends of Christ? and is
this his punishment?" He prostrates himself before Him; grasps the hem
of the garment; entreats forgiveness for what was only due to the
reverence of his love, to his desire that his Lord should be worshipped
in all spiritual beauty and truth.

The Face turns towards him in a flood of light. The vesture encloses him
in its folds, and he is borne onwards till he finds himself at Rome, and
in front of St. Peter's Church. He sees the interior without entering.
It swarms with worshippers, packed into it as in the hollow of a hive.
All there is breathless expectation, ecstatic awe; for the mystery of
the mass is in process of consummation, and in another moment the
tinkling of the silver bell will announce to the prostrate crowd the
actual presence of their Lord; will open to them the vision of the
coming heavenly day. Here, too, is faith, though obscured in a different
manner. Here, too, is _love_: the love which in bygone days hurled
intellect from its throne, and trampled on the glories of ancient
art--which instructed its votaries to feel blindly for its new and
all-sufficient life, as does the babe for its mother's breast--which
consecrates even now the deepest workings of the heart and mind to the
service of God. And Christ enters the Basilica, into which, after a
momentary doubt, he himself follows Him.

They float onwards a