rone among your painted clouds! And now, to me the axe, I wield it!"

Monsieur Becker and Wilfrid gazed at the young girl with something like
terror.

"To believe," continued Seraphita, in her Woman's voice, for the Man
had finished speaking, "to believe is a gift. To believe is to feel.
To believe in God we must feel God. This feeling is a possession slowly
acquired by the human being, just as other astonishing powers which you
admire in great men, warriors, artists, scholars, those who know and
those who act, are acquired. Thought, that budget of the relations which
you perceive among created things, is an intellectual language which can
be learned, is it not? Belief, the budget of celestial truths, is also a
language as superior to thought as thought is to instinct. This language
also can be learned. The Believer answers with a single cry, a single
gesture; Faith puts within his hand a flaming sword with which he
pierces and illumines all. The Seer attains to heaven and descends not.
But there are beings who believe and see, who know and will, who love
and pray and wait. Submissive, yet aspiring to the kingdom of light,
they have neither the aloofness of the Believer nor the silence of the
Seer; they listen and reply. To them the doubt of the twilight ages
is not a murderous weapon, but a divining rod; they accept the contest
under every form; they train their tongues to every language; they are
never angered, though they groan; the acrimony of the aggressor is not
in them, but rather the softness and tenuity of light, which penetrates
and warms and illumines. To their eyes Doubt is neither an impiety, nor
a blasphemy, nor a crime, but a transition through which men return upon
their steps in the Darkness, or advance into the Light. This being so,
dear pastor, let us reason together.

"You do not believe in God? Why? God, to your thinking, is
incomprehensible, inexplicable. Agreed. I will not reply that to
comprehend God in His entirety would be to be God; nor will I tell you
that you deny what seems to you inexplicable so as to give me the right
to affirm that which to me is believable. There is, for you, one
evident fact, which lies within yourself. In you, Matter has ended in
intelligence; can you therefore think that human intelligence will
end in darkness, doubt, and nothingness? God may seem to you
incomprehensible and inexplicable, but you must admit Him to be, in all
things purely physical, a splendid and c