"I am glad to see you. Sit down. You look ill—what can I do for you?"
"Listen to me! I will tell you all."
Then he opened his heart freely to the preacher, who listened with intense sympathy and understanding—sometimes speaking a word of encouragement, sometimes only touching his hand, or whispering, "Go on, Robert." And perhaps there was not another man in California, so able to comprehend the marvellous story of Robert's return unto his better self. For he had in a large measure that penetrative insight into spiritualities, which connect man with the unseen world; and that mystical, incommunicable sense of a life, that is not this life. He knew its voices, intuitions, and celestial intimations—things, which no one knoweth, save they who receive them. And when Robert had finished his confession, he said:
"I also, Robert, have stood on that shining table-land which lies on the frontier of our consciousness; and there received that blessed certainty of God which can never again leave the soul. And you must not wonder at the suddenness and rapidity of the vision. Every experience of this kind must be sharply sudden. That chasm dividing the seen from the unseen, must be taken at one swift bound, or not at all. You cannot break that leap. Thank God, you have taken it! This remembrance, and the power it has left behind, can never depart from you; for
'Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest,
Cannot confound, nor doubt Him, nor deny.'
The whole world may deny, but what is the voice of the whole world to those, who have seen and heard and known
'A deep below the deep,
And a height beyond the height,
Where our hearing is not hearing,
And our seeing is not sight'?
What you have told me, Robert, also goes to confirm what I have before noticed—that this great favor of vision is usually the cup of strength, given to us in some great agony or strait."
"Now, father, may I see Theodora?"
"She went to her room to rest after our early dinner. She also has suffered."