ty? Did not your very dissatisfaction with them show
you that the true inspirer ought to be, if he were to satisfy your
cravings, a person, truly--else how could he inspire and teach you,
a person yourself!--but an utterly infinite, omniscient, eternal
person? How know you that in that dream He was not unveiling
Himself to you--He, The Spirit, who is the Lord and Giver of Life;
The Spirit, who teaches men their duty and relation to those above,
around, beneath them; the Spirit of order, obedience, loyalty,
brotherhood, mercy, condescension?'

'But I never could distinguish these dreams from each other; the
moment that I essayed to separate them, I seemed to break up the
thought of an absolute one ground of all things, without which the
universe would have seemed a piecemeal chaos; and they receded to
infinite distance, and became transparent, barren, notional shadows
of my own brain, even as your words are now.'

'How know you that you were meant to distinguish them? How know you
that that very impossibility was not the testimony of fact and
experience to that old Catholic dogma, for the sake of which you
just now shrank from my teaching? I say that this is so. How do
you know that it is not?'

'But how do I know that it is? I want proof.'

'And you are the man who was, five minutes ago, crying out for
practical facts, and disdaining cold abstract necessities of logic!
Can you prove that your body exists?'

'No.'

'Can you prove that your spirit exists?'

'No.'

'And yet know that they both exist. And how?'

'Solvitur ambulando.'

'Exactly. When you try to prove either of them without the other,
you fail. You arrive, if at anything, at some barren polar notion.
By action alone you prove the mesothetic fact which underlies and
unites them.'

'Quorsum haec?'

'Hither. I am not going to demonstrate the indemonstrable--to give
you intellectual notions which, after all, will be but reflexes of
my own peculiar brain, and so add the green of my spectacles to the
orange of yours, and make night hideous by fresh monsters. I may
help you to think yourself into a theoretical Tritheism, or a
theoretical Sabellianism; I cannot make you think yourself into
practical and living Catholicism. As you of anthropology, so I say
of theology,--Solvitur ambulando. Don't believe Catholic doctrine
unless you like; faith is free. But see if you can reclaim either
society or yoursel