At night, when he could not sleep, Francesco would read to him from the Gospels. Never had they seemed to him so new, so rare in excellence, so little understood of men. Some sayings, as he thought out their meaning, deepened for him like wells.
"Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." Was this indeed the answer to the question of his whole life, 'Shall not men have wings?'
"And having ended all his temptation, the devil departed from him for a season." What did that mean? When did the devil return to him again?
Words which might have seemed to him full of the greatest error, contrary to experience and natural law, still did not repel him.
'If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove.'
He had always thought that the final knowledge and the final faith would lead by different paths to the same goal, the blending of outward and inward necessity, the will of man and the will of God. Yet was not the sting of the words in the fact that to have faith, even as a grain of mustard-seed, was more difficult than to see the mountain remove unto yonder place?
But there was a saying of Christ's still more enigmatical: "I thank thee, Father, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." How reconcile this with the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents"?
And, again, "Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin. Take no thought saying what shall we eat or what shall we drink, for after all these things do the Gentiles seek, and your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."
Leonardo recalled his discoveries and inventions, the machines for giving men power over nature, and asked himself:—
'Is all this care for the body—what shall we eat and what shall we drink, and the like—is it mammon worship? Is there nothing in human toil, in knowledge, but the mere profit? Is knowledge like Martha, who is careful and troubled about many things, but not about the one thing needful? Is love like Mary, who has chosen the good part and sitteth at the Master's feet?'