the Word. The
Spirit, descending, bears man above this earth, opens the seas and lets
him see their depths, shows him lost species, wakens dry bones whose
dust is the soil of valleys; the Apostle writes the Apocalypse, and
twenty centuries later human science ratifies his words and turns his
visions into maxims. And what comes of it all? Why this,--that the
peoples live as they have ever lived, as they lived in the first
Olympiad, as they lived on the morrow of Creation, and on the eve of the
great cataclysm. The waves of Doubt have covered all things. The same
floods surge with the same measured motion on the human granite which
serves as a boundary to the ocean of intelligence. When man has inquired
of himself whether he has seen that which he has seen, whether he has
heard the words that entered his ears, whether the facts were facts and
the idea is indeed an idea, then he resumes his wonted bearing, thinks
of his worldly interests, obeys some envoy of death and of oblivion
whose dusky mantle covers like a pall an ancient Humanity of which
the moderns retain no memory. Man never pauses; he goes his round,
he vegetates until the appointed day when his Axe falls. If this wave
force, this pressure of bitter waters prevents all progress, no doubt it
also warns of death. Spirits prepared by faith among the higher souls of
earth can alone perceive the mystic ladder of Jacob.

After listening to Seraphita's answer in which (being earnestly
questioned) she unrolled before their eyes a Divine Perspective,--as an
organ fills a church with sonorous sound and reveals a musical universe,
its solemn tones rising to the loftiest arches and playing, like light,
upon their foliated capitals,--Wilfrid returned to his own room, awed
by the sight of a world in ruins, and on those ruins the brilliance of
mysterious lights poured forth in torrents by the hand of a young girl.
On the morrow he still thought of these things, but his awe was gone; he
felt he was neither destroyed nor changed; his passions, his ideas awoke
in full force, fresh and vigorous. He went to breakfast with Monsieur
Becker and found the old man absorbed in the "Treatise on Incantations,"
which he had searched since early morning to convince his guest that
there was nothing unprecedented in all that they had seen and heard at
the Swedish castle. With the childlike trustfulness of a true scholar
he had folded down the pages in which Jean Wier related authentic facts
w