he result of their similar attempt.'

'Idolatry and magic.'

'True; and yet, such is the ambition of man, you who were just now
envying Tregarva, are already longing to climb even higher than
Saint Theresa.'

'I do not often indulge in such an ambition. But I have read in
your Schoolmen tales of a Beatific Vision; how that the highest good
for man was to see God.'

'And did you believe that?'

'One cannot believe the impossible--only regret its impossibility.'

'Impossibility? You can only see the Uncreate in the Create--the
Infinite in the Finite--the absolute good in that which is like the
good. Does Tregarva pretend to more? He sees God in His own
thoughts and consciousnesses, and in the events of the world around
him, imaged in the mirror of his own mind. Is your mirror, then, so
much narrower than his?'

'I have none. I see but myself, and the world, and far above them,
a dim awful Unity, which is but a notion.'

'Fool!--and slow of heart to believe! Where else would you see Him
but in yourself and in the world? They are all things cognisable to
you. Where else, but everywhere, would you see Him whom no man hath
seen, or can see?'

'When He shows Himself to me in them, then I may see Him. But now--
'

'You have seen Him; and because you do not know the name of what you
see--or rather will not acknowledge it--you fancy that it is not
there.'

'How in His name? What have I seen?'

'Ask yourself. Have you not seen, in your fancy, at least, an ideal
of man, for which you spurned (for Mellot has told me all) the
merely negative angelic--the merely receptive and indulgent
feminine-ideals of humanity, and longed to be a man, like that ideal
and perfect man?'

'I have.'

'And what was your misery all along? Was it not that you felt you
ought to be a person with a one inner unity, a one practical will,
purpose, and business given to you--not invented by yourself--in the
great order and harmony of the universe,--and that you were not
one?--That your self-willed fancies, and self-pleasing passions, had
torn you in pieces, and left you inconsistent, dismembered,
helpless, purposeless? That, in short, you were below your ideal,
just in proportion as you were not a person?'

'God knows you speak truth!'

'Then must not that ideal of humanity be a person himself?--Else how
can he be the ideal man? Where is your logic? An impersonal ideal
of a personal species! . .