"When I employ a word I want it to mean something. After many years of thought and observation I am beginning to mean something more or less distinct when I say Christ. Why? Because I have obtained so many signs of Christ, outward and inward, that I could form a fixed idea from them - not a picture, not an image, but an idea, what the professors call a hypothesis, and in which one may believe as every scholar may believe in his hypothesis, without absolute certainty, but with an ever-increasing degree of probability, so that one can make predictions and see them confirmed by experience. This is the faith that poets and scholars and originals and herd-men are all equally in need of."
"And does God not give such signs then?" asked Elsie.
"Patience, child! first come the signs and only then do the conclusions follow. I behold here a glorious, beneficent and comforting spectacle. That is a sign. But of what and of whom? Of a higher being than Christ? Surely. For earth and sun, that made this sign, are more than humanity. But our inward perceptibility experiences emotions which point to a supreme Being, the Almighty, who created the sun and the earth and all the stars, on whom all we know is dependent and to whom all is subject. No matter what we think we must always arrive at such a Being. It is impossible not to - whether we call it Nature or God or something else, or better still give it no name."
"Yes," said Elsie; "but for me again God, just like Christ, is a living, feeling, loving being. And Nature, sun, earth - all that is not living and feeling, is it -?"
"Dear Elsie, only in the beginning of this century, before the professors had yet thought out their impossible hypothesis of a dead matter and a soulless Nature, there was a poet who in a few words set forth the wisdom which the professors have forgotten and which they will have to remember again, before we have gone half a century further. This poet was named Shelley, and when he was not older than twenty, he wrote:
'Of all this varied and eternal world
Soul is the only element…
'The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
Is active, living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,