Part 24 (2/2)
”It is not to-morrow, but the day after. And our journey leads us across the great ocean, to the new country, where the new life is stirring, and foaming, and seething most intensely.”
”To America?”
”Yes, Elsje; are you willing? We shall escape the evil tongues in Holland. Evade the painful proximity of my old sphere of life. We shall not bury ourselves in some remote corner of the earth, but shall stand in the very midst of the most fiercely burning life, in the most intensively growing human world. There I can best become aware of what is to be expected of mankind, best divine what Christ intends with us and what he expects of me. If I can achieve anything indeed - it is there. I know it, for I know the country and the people, though I am not yet quite sure how I shall go about it.”
Elsje looked grave and thoughtful: not appalled or frightened by the prospect, but as though in a whirl of new overwhelming images. Then she asked shyly:
”And in this battle will there still be room and time for a small, peaceful home? And for a little, tender child?”
”Why not, Elsje? There too are peaceful dwellings and many tender little children also are born there. The fighting does not go on constantly.”
”I shall see that I am ready,” said Elsje. And she was, in good time.
XXVII
We stood upon the deck of the great trans-Atlantic steamer and our color-thirsty eyes drank in the rich scene of the cliffs and hills of Ireland, rising above a calm sea under a sky heavy with rain. Dark grayish-purple, light gray and white rain clouds to one side, above us a clear limpid blue, a short fragment of a rainbow rising out of the light emerald-green sea, and stretching straight across the faded brown and dull green land with the little white houses, on to the blackish-gray cloud which flowed out into mist and against which the bright colors shone dazzlingly. Thousands of white gulls round about the s.h.i.+p, like a whirling, living snow flurry, glittering in the bright sunlight and contrasting sharply with the dark background of clouds - screaming and screeching wildly and ceaselessly.
”The sign of the covenant,” said I, pointing to the rainbow.
”Do you really believe, Vico, that G.o.d gives such signs to men?”
”What do you mean by 'G.o.d,' Elsje?”
Elsje looked at me with pensive wonder.
”Do you then only believe in Christ and not in G.o.d?”
”When I employ a word I want it to mean something. After many years of thought and observation I am beginning to mean something more or less distinct when I say Christ. Why? Because I have obtained so many signs of Christ, outward and inward, that I could form a fixed idea from them - not a picture, not an image, but an idea, what the professors call a hypothesis, and in which one may believe as every scholar may believe in his hypothesis, without absolute certainty, but with an ever-increasing degree of probability, so that one can make predictions and see them confirmed by experience. This is the faith that poets and scholars and originals and herd-men are all equally in need of.”
”And does G.o.d not give such signs then?” asked Elsie.
”Patience, child! first come the signs and only then do the conclusions follow. I behold here a glorious, beneficent and comforting spectacle.
That is a sign. But of what and of whom? Of a higher being than Christ?
Surely. For earth and sun, that made this sign, are more than humanity.
But our inward perceptibility experiences emotions which point to a supreme Being, the Almighty, who created the sun and the earth and all the stars, on whom all we know is dependent and to whom all is subject.
No matter what we think we must always arrive at such a Being. It is impossible not to - whether we call it Nature or G.o.d or something else, or better still give it no name.”
”Yes,” said Elsie; ”but for me again G.o.d, just like Christ, is a living, feeling, loving being. And Nature, sun, earth - all that is not living and feeling, is it -?”
”Dear Elsie, only in the beginning of this century, before the professors had yet thought out their impossible hypothesis of a dead matter and a soulless Nature, there was a poet who in a few words set forth the wisdom which the professors have forgotten and which they will have to remember again, before we have gone half a century further. This poet was named Sh.e.l.ley, and when he was not older than twenty, he wrote:
'Of all this varied and eternal world
Soul is the only element...
'The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
Is active, living spirit. Every grain
<script>