‘No!—do not cheat me! You said once that you were a churchman.’
‘So I am. A Catholic of the Catholics. What then?’
‘Who is He to whom you ask me to turn? You talk to me of Him as my Father; but you talk of Him to men of your own creed as The Father. You have mysterious dogmas of a Three in One. I know them . . . I have admired them. In all their forms—in the Vedas, in the Neo-Platonists, in Jacob Boëhmen, in your Catholic creeds, in Coleridge, and the Germans from whom he borrowed, I have looked at them, and found in them beautiful phantasms of philosophy, . . . all but scientific necessities; . . . but—’
‘But what?’
‘I do not want cold abstract necessities of logic: I want living practical facts. If those mysterious dogmas speak of real and necessary properties of His being, they must be necessarily interwoven in practice with His revelation of Himself?’
‘Most true. But how would you have Him unveil Himself?’
‘By unveiling Himself.’
‘What? To your simple intuition? That was Semele’s ambition. . . . You recollect the end of that myth. You recollect, too, as you have read the Neo-Platonists, the 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.’