Five more years pass away. He is sixteen, and a perfect book-worm.
Looking up from the story he is reading, he exclaims impatiently:
‘I can’t think why they want to work these silly love-stories into all these books. A fellow can’t pick [269] up a decent book but there’s a love-story running through it. It’s horrid!’ He has come upon the greatest word in the language; but it has no meaning for him!
But five years later he understands! He has been captivated by a pure and radiant face, by a charming and graceful form, by lovely eyes that answer to his own. That great word love has been made flesh to him, and it simply gleams with meaning. And so, all through the years, as life goes on, he finds the great key-words expounded to him through infinite processes of incarnation. ‘Ideas,’ says George Eliot, ‘are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in their vapour and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hand, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.’
And if this be so with other words, how could the greatest, grandest, holiest word of all have been expressed except in the very selfsame way? ‘The Word was made flesh.’ There was no other way of [270] saying God intelligibly. I should never, never, never have understood mere abstract definitions of so august a term. And so—‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was made flesh.’ I can grasp that great word now. Bethlehem and Olivet, Galilee and Calvary, have made it wonderfully plain. The word God would have frightened me if it had never been expressed in the terms of ‘a Face like my face’—as Browning puts it—and a heart that beats in sympathy with my own. And so Tennyson says:
And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought;
Which he may read that binds the sheaf,