"Yes; he will come back, if his life is spared. It may be many
years; but he will come, he will come."
Their eyes met; there was a long, searching look from Mr. Lindsay;
she did not shrink from the scrutiny. An expression of keen sorrow
swept over his face, but he conquered his emotion, took the parcel
he had brought, and, unwrapping a book, said, in his usual quiet
tone: "When I saw you last you were regretting your inability to procure
Sir William Hamilton's 'Philosophy of the Conditioned,' and I have
taken the liberty of bringing you my own copy. Read it at your
leisure; I shall not need it again soon. I do not offer it as a
system which will satisfy your mind, by solving all your problems;
but I do most earnestly commend his 'Philosophy of the Conditioned,'
as the surest antidote to the abstractions in which your speculation
has involved you. The most erudite scholar of the age, and one of
the finest metaphysical minds the world has ever known, he expressly
sums up his vast philosophic researches with the humble confession:
'There are two sorts of ignorances; we philosophize to escape
ignorance, and the consummation of our philosophy is ignorance; we
start from the one, we repose in the other; they are the goals from
which, and to which, we tend; and the pursuit of knowledge is but a
course between two ignorances, as human life is itself only a
traveling from grave to grave. The highest reach of human science is
the scientific recognition of human ignorance.' Like you, Miss
Beulah, I set out to discover some system where no mysteries
existed; where I should only believe what I could clearly
comprehend. 'Yes,' said I proudly, 'I will believe nothing that I
cannot understand.' I wandered on until, like you, I stood in a wide
waste, strewn with the wreck of beliefs. My pride asserted that my
reason was the only and sufficient guide, and whither did it lead
me? Into vagaries more inexplicable than aught I fled from in
Revelation. It was easier to believe that, 'in the beginning, God
created the heaven and the earth,' than that the glorious universe
looked to chance as its sole architect, or that it was a huge
lumbering machine of matter, grinding out laws. I saw that I was the
victim of a miserable delusion in supposing my finite faculties
could successfully grapple with the mysteries of the universe. I
found that to receive the attempted solutions of philosophy required
more faith than Revelation, and my proud soul humbled itself and
rested in the Bible. My philosophic experience had taught me that if
mankind were to have any knowledge of their origin, their destiny,
their God, it must be revealed by that God, for man could never
discover aught for himself. There are mysteries in the Bible which I
cannot explain; but it bears incontrovertible marks of divine
origin, and as such I receive it. I can sooner believe the Mosaic
revelation than the doctrine which tells you that you are part of
God and capable of penetrating to absolute truth. To quote the
expressive language of an acute critic (whose well-known
latitudinarianism and disbelief in the verbal inspiration of
Scripture give peculiar weight to his opinion on this subject),
'when the advocates of this natural, spontaneous inspiration will
come forth from their recesses of thought and deliver prophecies as
clear as those of the Hebrew seer; when they shall mold the elements
of nature to their will; when they shall speak with the sublime
authority of Jesus of Nazareth; and with the same infinite ease,
rising beyond all the influence of time, place, and circumstances,
explain the past and unfold the future; when they die for the truth
they utter, and rise again as witnesses to its divinity; then we may
begin to place them on the elevation which they so thoughtlessly
claim. But until they either prove these facts to be delusions, or
give their parallel in themselves, the world may well laugh at their
ambition and trample their spurious inspiration beneath its feet.'
There is an infinite, eternal, and loving God; I am a finite
creature, unable to comprehend him, and knowing him only through his
own revelation. This very revelation is insufficient for our
aspiring souls, I grant; but it declares emphatically that here 'we
see through a glass darkly.' Better this than the starless night in
which you grope, without a promise of the dawn of eternity, where
all mystery shall be explained. Are you not weary of fruitless,
mocking speculation?" He looked at her anxiously.