‘In what sense, now, is that a possession? Do you possess the sun because you see it? Did Herschel create Uranus by discovering it; or even increase, by an atom, its attraction on one particle of his own body?”
‘Whither is all this tending?’
‘Hither. Tregarva does not possess his Father and his Lord; he is possessed by them.’
‘But he would say—and I should believe him—that he has seen and known them, not with his bodily eyes, but with his soul, heart, imagination—call it what you will. All I know is, that between him and me there is a great gulf fixed.’
‘What! seen and known them utterly? comprehended them? Are they not infinite, incomprehensible? Can the less comprehend the greater?’
‘He knows, at least, enough of them to make him what I am not.’
‘That is, he knows something of them. And may not you know something of them also?—enough to make you what he is not?’
Lancelot shook his head in silence.
‘Suppose that you had met and spoken with your father, and loved him when you saw him, and yet were not aware of the relation in which you stood to him, still you would know him?’
‘Not the most important thing of all—that he was my father.’