nerved and braced; whatever oscillations the mind might go through in
its search for another equilibrium, to-night there was a moment of calm.
The earth to him was once more full of God, existence full of value.

'The things I have always loved, I love still!' he had said to Mr.
Grey. And in this healing darkness it was as if the old loves, the old
familiar images of thought, returned to him new-clad, re-entering the
desolate heart in a white-winged procession of consolation. On the heath
beside him Christ stood once more, and as the disciple felt the sacred
presence, he could bear for the first time to let the chafing, pent-up
current of love flow into the new channels, so painfully prepared for
it by the toil of thought. '_Either God or an impostor_.' What scorn
the heart, the intellect, threw on the alternative! Not in the dress of
speculations which represent the product of long past, long superseded
looms of human thought, but in the guise of common manhood, laden
like his fellows with the pathetic weight of human weakness and human
ignorance, the Master moves toward him--

'_Like you, my son, I struggled and I prayed. Like you, I had my days
of doubt and nights of wrestling. I had my dreams, my delusions, with
my fellows. I was weak; I suffered; I died. But God was in me, and the
courage, the patience, the love He gave to me; the scenes of the poor
human life He inspired; have become by His will the world's eternal
lesson--man's primer of Divine things, hung high in the eyes of all,
simple and wise, that all may see and all may learn. Take it to
your heart again--that life, that pain, of mine! Use it to new ends;
apprehend it in new ways; but knowledge shall not take it from you;
love, instead of weakening or forgetting, if it be but faithful, shall
find ever fresh power of realizing and renewing itself._'

So said the vision; and carrying the passion of it deep in his heart the
Rector went his way, down the long stony hill, past the solitary farm
amid the trees at the foot of it, across the grassy common beyond, with
its sentinel clumps of beeches, past an ethereal string of tiny lakes
just touched by the moonrise, beside some of the first cottages of
Murewell, up the hill, with pulse beating and step quickening, and round
into the stretch of road leading to his own gate.

As soon as he had passed the screen made by the shrubs on the lawn,
he saw it all as he had seen it in his waking dream on the common--the