‘I do not often indulge in such an ambition. But I have read in your Schoolmen tales of a Beatific Vision; how that the highest good for man was to see God.’
‘And did you believe that?’
‘One cannot believe the impossible—only regret its impossibility.’
‘Impossibility? You can only see the Uncreate in the Create—the Infinite in the Finite—the absolute good in that which is like the good. Does Tregarva pretend to more? He sees God in His own thoughts and consciousnesses, and in the events of the world around him, imaged in the mirror of his own mind. Is your mirror, then, so much narrower than his?’
‘I have none. I see but myself, and the world, and far above them, a dim awful Unity, which is but a notion.’
‘Fool!—and slow of heart to believe! Where else would you see Him but in yourself and in the world? They are all things cognisable to you. Where else, but everywhere, would you see Him whom no man hath seen, or can see?’
‘When He shows Himself to me in them, then I may see Him. But now—’
‘You have seen Him; and because you do not know the name of what you see—or rather will not acknowledge it—you fancy that it is not there.’
‘How in His name? What have I seen?’
‘Ask yourself. Have you not seen, in your fancy, at least, an ideal of man, for which you spurned (for Mellot has told me all) the merely negative angelic—the merely receptive and indulgent feminine-ideals of humanity, and longed to be a man, like that ideal and perfect man?’