It is true that he had bent in heathen temples with an almost equal devotion; but it was always to the same God.
“Show me the path by which the instinct of worship in any people, or individual, climbs to what it can best conceive of the Divine,” he said, “and there I will find the footsteps of God coming to meet that soul. A sunbeam falls on limpid water and a lily, and they shine like jewels. The same beam, turning, falls unshrinkingly on the muddy pool, that brightens also after its manner, and as well as it can.”
To him the Indian praying-wheel, so often denounced as the height of material superstition, might be made to indicate a fuller conception of the infinity of God than was to be found in much of the worship that calls itself intelligent and spiritual. Written over and over on the parchment wound about this wheel is the one brief prayer, “O Jewel in the Lotos, Amen!” Their Divine One was as the light of the morning embodied and seated on a lotos-flower. Their prayer confesses nothing and asks nothing; yet it confesses and asks all. It is a dull longing in the dull, and a lark song in the spiritual. It expresses their despair of being able to tell his greatness, or their need of him. It repeats itself as the flutterings of a bird’s wings repeat themselves when it soars. The soul says, “As many times as it is here inscribed, multiplied by as many times as the wheel revolves when I touch it, and yet a million times more, do I praise thee, do I implore thee, do I love thee, O thou Divine Light of the world! Even as the planets whirl ceaselessly wrapped about in the hieroglyphs of obedience to thy laws, so does this wheel, encircled by the aspirations of our worship, speak to thee for us.”
He entered one of their temples with respect, and kneeling there, remembered what their Hindu teachers had said to him:
“Owing to the greatness of the Deity, the One Soul is lauded in many ways. The different Gods are the members of the One Soul.”
And also: “One cannot attain to the Divine Sun through the word, through the mind, or through the eye. It is only reached by him who says, ‘It is! It is!’”
As he meditated then with the door of his soul wide open, it had seemed to him that all the gods and all the worships of men had gathered themselves before him, and mingled, as mists gather into a cloud, and that from turbulent they had grown still, and from dark they had gathered to themselves light, growing more golden in the centre, as though their divers elements were purifying themselves to form some new unity, till the crude and useless all melted away, parting to disclose an infant seated on a lotos-flower, and shining like the morning sun. And the lotos-flower was the figure of a pure woman.
“It is! It is!” he had said then. And that wide essential faith had survived, though for details of dogma he had gone out of the world with the same word with which he had begun his studies: “I do not know!”
A funeral gondola came and took his body away, several gentlemen, Don Claudio among them, accompanying.
Tacita, wrapped in the window curtain, watched them till the gondola disappeared under the Rialto bridge, then threw herself, sobbing, into her companion’s arms.