But in these matters silence is the final eloquence. One does not argue with moonlight. Men talk of “finding God,” but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest of hiding-places, your own heart. You yourself are a part of Him. The chief danger is to be too prosaic. Any one who has ever done proof-reading knows the delicious fidelity and strict zeal and maddening literalness with which the professional corrector marks a galley-proof. How he construes the text according to his own rote and rigid scheme; how he resents any unusual use of words; how he is so busy querying things that look odd to him that he misses many of the downright errors. That is precisely the attitude of man toward the universe, which he is so daringly anxious to interpret in some comforting sense. The journalist, whatever his sins and stupidities, would hope to enjoy the text of life in the spirit of a collaborating author rather than presume to correct it. And he will not do any great poet, such as Christ, the dishonour of taking him too literally.
We cannot hope until we have learned to despair. Let me remind you of some great lines by Andrew Marvell:
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
As lines, so loves oblique, may well
Themselves in every angle greet:
But ours, so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.