‘And what is your country?’ asked Lancelot. ‘It should be a noble one which breeds such men as you.’
The stranger smiled.
‘Will you go thither with me?’
‘Why not? I long for travel, and truly I am sick of my own country. When the Spirit of which you speak,’ 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.