"Till maimed and weary, burnt and blind,
I am made one with God, and feel
The tumult of the mindless mind
Torn on its own eternal wheel."
The suppliant replies that he knows from his own experience what such a counsel means, but has found it himself to be no longer practicable. There was a time, he says, when he found the perfect peace in kneeling before the Christian altar, but what is the Eucharist for him who can no longer believe in it? He still is prepared to follow the Spirit of Truth at all costs. "For me," he says:
"For me the kneeling knees are vain,
In vain for me the sacred dew.
I will not drink that wine again
Unless with thee I drink it new.
"Give me thy wings, thy wings of steel,
And I with thee will cleave the skies,
And broken on the eternal wheel
My God may take his sacrifice."
"And yet," he says in conclusion, "Truth, to those who follow it, may at last bring its own reward."
"Though storms may blow, though waves may roar,
It may be, ere the day is done,
Mine eyes shall turn to thine once more,
And learn that thine and his are one."
The Veil of the Temple winds up, in short, with the indication that, if both are completely thought out, the gospel of Faith is no more irrational than the gospel of scientific negation, and that the former can be a guide to action, whereas, if thought out completely, this is precisely what the latter cannot be.
The Reconstruction of Belief is a synthesis of the main arguments urged or suggested in these two preceding volumes. The necessity of religious belief as a practical basis of civilization is restated. The absurdity of all current attempts on the part of clerical apologists to revindicate it by scientific reason is set forth in detail. The true vindication is shown to reside in the fact that religious belief works, and that scientific negation does not work, and that here we have the practical test by which the validity of the former is to be established, though the process by which this fact will be apprehended by the modern world may be slow.