"Mirabiles elationes maris;
Mirabilis in altis Dominus!"
"Not very many 'upliftings' to-day," I replied. "You see our great friend at a disadvantage. But you know she has moods: and you will like her."
"Like her!" he replied. "It is not liking. It is worship. Some kind of Pantheism which I cannot explain. Nowhere are the loneliness and grandeur of God so manifested. Mind, I don't quite sympathize with that comparison of St. Augustine's where he detects a resemblance between yon spectra of purple and green and the plumage of a dove. What has a dove to do with such magnificence and grandeur? It was an anti-climax, a bathos, of which St. Augustine is seldom guilty. 'And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.' There's the sublime!"
"It is desolate," said I. "Not even a seamew or a gull."
"Quite so," he replied. "It is limitless and unconditioned. There is its grandeur. If that sea were ploughed by navies, or disfigured by the hideous black hulks of men-of-war, it would lose its magnificence. It would become a poor limited thing, with pygmies sporting on its bosom. It is now unlimited, free, unconditioned, as space. It is the infinite and the eternal in it that appeals to us. When we were children, the infinite lay beyond the next mountain, because it was the unknown. We grew up and we got knowledge; and knowledge destroyed our dreams, and left us only the commonplace. It is the unknown and unlimited that still appeals to us,—the something behind the dawn, and beyond the sunset, and far away athwart the black line of that horizon, that is forever calling, calling, and beckoning to us to go thither. Now, there is something in that sombre glory that speaks to you and me. It will disappear immediately; and we will feel sad. What is it? Voiceless echoes of light from the light that streams from the Lamb?"
"I hope," I said demurely, for I began to fear this young enthusiast, "that you don't preach in that tone to the people!"
"Oh dear, no," he said, with a little laugh, "but you must forgive my nonsense. You gave me such a shock of surprise."
"But," he said, after a pause, "how happy your life must have been here! I always felt in Manchester that I was living at the bottom of a black chimney, in smoke and noise and fetor, material and spiritual. Here, you have your holy people, and the silence and quiet of God. How happy you must have been!"
"What would you think if we returned," I said. "It's almost our dinner hour."
It was not so late, however, but that I was able to take a ten minutes' stroll through the village, and bid "good day" to some of my parishioners.