‘I have seen him! I understand now all the piteous humble pageant! I have beheld the Master as He lived and died; not the creature of a poet’s dream not the Divine Ideal I pictured in my blind and shadowy creed; but Jesus who perished on Calvary, Jesus the Martyr of the World.
‘All day long, from dawn to sunset, I sat in my place, watching the mysterious show. Words might faintly foreshadow to you what I beheld, but all words would fail to tell you what I felt; for never before, till these simple children of the mountains pictured it before me, had I realised the full sadness and rapture of that celestial Life. How faint, miserable, and unprofitable seemed my former creed, seen in the light of the tremendous Reality foreshadowed on that stage, with the mountains closing behind it, the blue heaven bending tranquilly above it, the birds singing on the branches round about, the wind and sunshine shining over it and bringing thither all the gentle motion of the world. Now for the first time I conceived that the Divine Story was not a poet’s dream, but a simple tale of sooth, a living experience which even the lowliest could understand and before which the highest and wisest must reverently bow.
‘I seem to see your look of wonder, and hear your cry of pitying pain. Is the man mad? you ask. Is it possible that sorrow has so weakened his brain that he can be overcome by such a summer cloud as the Passionspiel of a few rude peasants—a piece of mummery only worthy of a smile! Well, so it is, or seems. I tell you this “poor show” has done for me what all intellectual and moral effort has failed to do—it has brought me face to face with the living God.
‘This at least I know, that there is no via media between the full acceptance of Christ’s miraculous life and death, and acquiescence in the stark materialism of the new creed of scientific experience, whose most potent word is the godless Nirwâna of Schopenhauer.
‘Man cannot live by the shadowy gods of men—by the poetic spectre of a Divine Ideal, by the Christ of Fancy and of Poesy, by the Jesus of the dilettante, by the Messiah of a fairy tale. Such gods may do for happy hours; their ghostliness becomes apparent in times of spiritual despair and gloom.
‘“Except a man be born again, he shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven!” I have heard these divine words from the lips of one who seemed the Lord himself; nay, who perchance was that very Lord, putting on again the likeness of a poor peasant’s humanity, and clothing himself with flesh as with a garment. I have seen and heard with a child’s eyes, a child’s ears; and even as a child, I question no longer but believe.
‘Mea culpa! mea culpa! In the light of that piteous martyrdom I review the great sin of my life; but out of sin and its penalty has come transfiguration. I know now that my beloved one was taken from me in mercy, that I might follow in penitence and love. Patience, my darling, for I shall come;—God grant that it may be soon!’