no one left who _saw_. And he lives in a sense as of
decrepit age, seeking a "foot-hold through a blank profound;" grasping
at facts which snap beneath his touch; in strange lands, and among
people yet unborn, who ask,

"Was John at all, and did he say he saw?" (vol vii. p. 128.)

and will believe nothing till the proof be proved.

This prophetic self-consciousness does not, however, displace the memory
of his former self. John knows himself the man who _heard_ and
_saw_--receiving the words of Christ from His own mouth, and enduring
those glories of apocalyptic vision which he marvels that he could bear,
and live; seeing truths already plain grow of their own strength: and
those he guessed as points expanding into stars. And the life-long faith
regains its active power as the doubting future takes shape before him;
as he sees its children

"... stand conversing, each new face
Either in fields, of yellow summer eves,
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico
Out of the crowd in some enormous town
Where now the larks sing in a solitude:
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:...."
(vol. vii. p. 134.)

and he hears them questioning truths of deeper import than those of his
own life and work.

The subsequent monologue is an earnest endeavour to answer those
questionings, which he sets forth, in order that he may do so; his
eloquence being perhaps the more pathetic, that in the depth of his own
conviction--in his loving desire to impart it--he assumes a great deal
of what he tries to prove. "He has _seen_ it all--the miracle of that
life and death; the need, and yet the transiency, of death and sin; the
constant presence of the Divine love; those things which not only _were_
to him, but _are_. And he is called upon to prove it to those who
_cannot see_: whose spirit is darkened by the veil of fleshly strength,
while his own lies all but bare to the contact of the Heavenly light. He
must needs be as an optic-glass, bringing those things before them, not
in confusing nearness, but at the right historic distance from the eye."

"Life," he admits, "is given to us that we may learn the truth. But the
soul does not learn from it as the flesh does. For the flesh has little
time to stay, and must gain its lesson once and for all. Man needs no