,' he went on, bitterly, 'shall
descend, I may return; till then England is no place for the
penniless.'

'How know you that the Spirit is not even now poured out? Must your
English Pharisees and Sadducees, too, have signs and wonders ere
they believe? Will man never know that "the kingdom of God comes
not by observation"? that now, as ever, His promise stands true,--
"Lo! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world"? How
many inspired hearts even now may be cherishing in secret the idea
which shall reform the age, and fulfil at once the longings of every
sect and rank?'

'Name it to me, then!'

'Who can name it? Who can even see it, but those who are like Him
from whom it comes? Them a long and stern discipline awaits. Would
you be of them, you must, like the Highest who ever trod this earth,
go fasting into the wilderness, and, among the wild beasts, stand
alone face to face with the powers of Nature.'

'I will go where you shall bid me. I will turn shepherd among the
Scottish mountains--live as an anchorite in the solitudes of
Dartmoor. But to what purpose? I have listened long to Nature's
voice, but even the whispers of a spiritual presence which haunted
my childhood have died away, and I hear nothing in her but the
grinding of the iron wheels of mechanical necessity.'

'Which is the will of God. Henceforth you shall study, not Nature,
but Him. Yet as for place--I do not like your English primitive
formations, where earth, worn out with struggling, has fallen
wearily asleep. No, you shall rather come to Asia, the oldest and
yet the youngest continent,--to our volcanic mountain ranges, where
her bosom still heaves with the creative energy of youth, around the
primeval cradle of the most ancient race of men. Then, when you
have learnt the wondrous harmony between man and his dwelling-place,
I will lead you to a land where you shall see the highest spiritual
cultivation in triumphant contact with the fiercest energies of
matter; where men have learnt to tame and use alike the volcano and
the human heart, where the body and the spirit, the beautiful and
the useful, the human and the divine, are no longer separate, and
men have embodied to themselves on earth an image of the "city not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens."'

'Where is this land?' said Lancelot eagerly.

'Poor human nature must have its name for everything. You have
heard of the country o