"In point of fact, all the affinities are bound together by immediate similarities; the life of worlds is attracted to centres by a greedy aspiration, just as you are all driven by hunger to seek nourishment. To give you an instance of affinities linked to similarities: the secondary law on which the creations of your mind rest—music, a celestial art—is the active evidence of this principle: is it not an assemblage of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a condition of the air under compression, dilatation, and repercussion? You know of what the air is composed? Azote, carbon, and oxygen. Since you can produce no sound in a vacuum, it is evident that music and the human voice are the result of organic chemical elements, acting in unison with the same substances prepared within you by your mind, and co-ordinated by means of light, the great foster-mother of this globe; for can you have cogitated on the quantities of nitre deposited by the snows, on the discharge of thunder, on plants which derive from the air the elements they contain, and have failed to conclude that it is the sun that fuses and diffuses the subtle essence which nourishes all things here below? Swedenborg truly said, 'The earth is a man.'
"All your sciences of to-day, which make you so great in your own eyes, are a mere trifle compared with the light that floods the Seer.
"Cease, cease to question me; we speak a different language. I have used yours for once, to throw a flash of faith upon your souls, to cast a corner of my mantle over you, and tempt you away to the glorious regions of prayer. Is it God's part to stoop to you? Is it not yours rather to rise to Him? If human reason has so soon exhausted the limits of its powers merely by laying God out to prove His existence, without succeeding in doing so, is it not evident that it must seek some other way of knowing Him? That other way is in ourselves. The Seer and the believer have within themselves eyes more piercing than are those eyes which are bent on things of earth, and they discern a dawn.
"Understand this saying: Your most exact sciences, your boldest speculations, your brightest flashes of light, are but clouds. Above them all is the sanctuary whence the true Light is shed."
She sat down and was silent; and her calm features betrayed not the least sign of the trepidation which commonly disturbs an orator after his least inflamed speech.
Wilfrid whispered into the pastor's ear, leaning over him to do so:
"Who told her all this?"
"I do not know," was the reply.
"He was milder on the Falberg," Minna remarked.
Seraphita passed her hands over her eyes, and said with a smile: