The ideas they used to interpret their vision to themselves were to the things seen what the visible senses of a man are to his soul, the material covering of a divine essence.
The departing spirit was above them, shedding incense without odor, melody without sound. About them, where they stood, were neither surfaces, nor angles, nor atmosphere.
They dared neither question him nor contemplate him; they stood in the shadow of that Presence as beneath the burning rays of a tropical sun, fearing to raise their eyes lest the light should blast them.
They knew they were beside him, without being able to perceive how it was that they stood, as in a dream, on the confines of the Visible and the Invisible, nor how they had lost sight of the Visible and how they beheld the Invisible.
To each other they said: “If he touches us, we can die!” But the spirit was now within the Infinite, and they knew not that neither time, nor space, nor death, existed there, and that a great gulf lay between them, although they thought themselves beside him.
Their souls were not prepared to receive in its fulness a knowledge of the faculties of that Life; they could have only faint and confused perceptions of it, suited to their weakness.
Were it not so, the thunder of the Living Word, whose far-off tones now reached their ears, and whose meaning entered their souls as life unites with body,—one echo of that Word would have consumed their being as a whirlwind of fire laps up a fragile straw.
Therefore they saw only that which their nature, sustained by the strength of the spirit, permitted them to see; they heard that only which they were able to hear.
And yet, though thus protected, they shuddered when the Voice of the anguished soul broke forth above them—the prayer of the Spirit awaiting Life and imploring it with a cry.
That cry froze them to the very marrow of their bones.