a?'

'He is a righteous man, and I--'

'Am a sinner. He would, and rightly, call himself the same.'

'But he knows that God loves him--that he is God's child.'

'So, then, God did not love him till he caused God to love him, by
knowing that He loved him? He was not God's child till he made
himself one, by believing that he was one when as yet he was not? I
appeal to common sense and logic . . . It was revealed to Tregarva
that God had been loving him while he was yet a bad man. If He
loved him, in spite of his sin, why should He not have loved you?'

'If He had loved me, would He have left me in ignorance of Himself?
For if He be, to know Him is the highest good.'

'Had he left Tregarva in ignorance of Himself?'

'No. . . . Certainly, Tregarva spoke of his conversion as of a
turning to one of whom he had known all along, and disregarded.'

'Then do you turn like him, to Him whom you have known all along,
and disregarded.'

'I?'

'Yes--you! If half I have heard and seen of you be true, He has
been telling you more, and not less, of Himself than He does to most
men. You, for aught I know, may know more of Him than Tregarva
does. The gulf between you and him is this: he has obeyed what he
knew--and you have not.' . . .

Lancelot paused a moment, then--

'No!--do not cheat me! You said once that you were a churchman.'

'So I am. A Catholic of the Catholics. What then?'

'Who is He to whom you ask me to turn? You talk to me of Him as my
Father; but you talk of Him to men of your own creed as The Father.
You have mysterious dogmas of a Three in One. I know them . . . I
have admired them. In all their forms--in the Vedas, in the Neo-
Platonists, in Jacob Boehmen, in your Catholic creeds, in Coleridge,
and the Germans from whom he borrowed, I have looked at them, and
found in them beautiful phantasms of philosophy, . . . all but
scientific necessities; . . . but--'

'But what?'

'I do not want cold abstract necessities of logic: I want living
practical facts. If those mysterious dogmas speak of real and
necessary properties of His being, they must be necessarily
interwoven in practice with His revelation of Himself?'

'Most true. But how would you have Him unveil Himself?'

'By unveiling Himself.'

'What? To your simple intuition? That was Semele's ambition. . . .
You recollect the end of that myth. You recollect, too, as you have
read the Neo-Platonists, t