inertia or
gravity is produced by a rupture between a thing and the
movement which appertains to it. Then it was that he foresaw the
crumbling of the worlds and their
destruction if God should withdraw
the Breath of His Word. He searched the Apocalypse for the traces of
that Word. You thought him mad. Understand him better! He was seeking
pardon for the work of his genius.
"Wilfrid, you have come here hoping to make me solve equations, or
rise upon a rain-cloud, or
plunge into the fiord and
reappear a swan.
If science or
miracles were the end and object of
humanity, Moses
would have bequeathed to you the law of fluxions; Jesus Christ would
have lightened the darkness of your sciences; his
apostles would have
told you
whence come those vast trains of gas and melted metals,
attached to cores which
revolve and solidify as they dart through
ether, or
violently enter some
system and
combine with a star,
jostling and displacing it by the shock, or destroying it by the
infiltration of their
deadly gases; Saint Paul, instead of telling you
to live in God, would have explained why food is the secret bond among
all
creations and the
evident tie between all living Species. In these
days the greatest
miracle of all would be the discovery of the
squaring of the circle,--a problem which you hold to be insoluble, but
which is
doubtless solved in the march of worlds by the intersection
of some
mathematical lines whose course is
visible to the eye of
spirits who have reached the higher
spheres. Believe me,
miracles are
in us, not without us. Here natural facts occur which men call
supernatural. God would have been
strangelyunjust had he confined the
testimony of his power to certain generations and peoples and denied
them to others. The
brazen rod belongs to all. Neither Moses, nor
Jacob, nor Zoroaster, nor Paul, nor Pythagoras, nor Swedenborg, not
the humblest Messenger nor the loftiest Prophet of the Most High are
greater than you are
capable of being. Only, there come to nations as
to men certain periods when Faith is theirs.
"If material sciences be the end and object of human effort, tell me,
both of you, would societies,--those great centres where men
congregate,--would they perpetually be dispersed? If
civilization were
the object of our Species, would
intelligenceperish? would it
continue
purely individual? The
grandeur of all nations that were
truly great was based on
exceptions; when the
exception ceased their
power died. If such were the End-all, Prophets, Seers, and Messengers
of God would have lent their hand to Science rather than have given it
to Belief. Surely they would have quickened your brains sooner than
have touched your hearts! But no; one and all they came to lead the
nations back to God; they proclaimed the
sacred Path in simple words
that showed the way to heaven; all were wrapped in love and faith, all
were inspired by that WORD which hovers above the inhabitants of
earth, enfolding them, inspiriting them, uplifting them; none were
prompted by any human interest. Your great geniuses, your poets, your
kings, your
learned men are engulfed with their cities; while the
names of these good
pastors of
humanity, ever
blessed, have survived
all cataclysms.
"Alas! we cannot understand each other on any point. We are separated
by an abyss. You are on the side of darkness, while I--I live in the
light, the true Light! Is this the word that you ask of me? I say it
with joy; it may change you. Know this: there are sciences of matter
and sciences of spirit. There, where you see substances, I see forces
that stretch one toward another with generating power. To me, the
character of bodies is the
indication of their principles and the sign
of their properties. Those principles beget affinities which escape
your knowledge, and which are linked to centres. The different
speciesamong which life is distributed are unfailing streams which correspond
unfailingly among themselves. Each has his own
vocation. Man is effect
and cause. He is fed, but he feeds in turn. When you call God a
Creator, you dwarf Him. He did not create, as you think He did, plants
or animals or stars. Could He proceed by a
variety of means? Must He
not act by unity of
composition? Moreover, He gave forth principles to
be developed, according to His
universal law, at the will of the
surroundings in which they were placed. Hence a single substance and
motion, a single plant, a single animal, but correlations everywhere.
In fact, all affinities are linked together by contiguous similitudes;
the life of the worlds is drawn toward the centres by famished
aspiration, as you are drawn by
hunger to seek food.
"To give you an example of affinities linked to similitudes (a
secondary law on which the
creations of your thought are based),
music, that
celestial art, is the
working out of this principle; for
is it not a complement of sounds harmonized by number? Is not sound a
modification of air,
compressed, dilated, echoed? You know the
composition of air,--oxygen,
nitrogen, and
carbon. As you cannot
obtain sound from the void, it is plain that music and the human voice
are the result of organized
chemical substances, which put themselves
in
unison with the same substances prepared within you by your
thought, co-ordinated by means of light, the great
nourisher of your
globe. Have you ever meditated on the masses of nitre deposited by the
snow, have you ever observed a thunderstorm and seen the plants
breathing in from the air about them the metal it contains, without
concluding that the sun has fused and distributed the subtle essence
which
nourishes all things here below? Swedenborg has said, 'The earth
is a man.'
"Your Science, which makes you great in your own eyes, is paltry
indeed beside the light which bathes a Seer. Cease, cease to question
me; our languages are different. For a moment I have used yours to
cast, if it be possible, a ray of faith into your soul; to give you,
as it were, the hem of my
garment and draw you up into the regions of
Prayer. Can God abase Himself to you? Is it not for you to rise to
Him? If human reason finds the
ladder of its own strength too weak to
bring God down to it, is it not
evident that you must find some other
path to reach Him? That Path is in ourselves. The Seer and the
Believer find eyes within their souls more
piercing far than eyes that
probe the things of earth,--they see the Dawn. Hear this truth: Your
science, let it be never so exact, your meditations, however bold,
your noblest lights are Clouds. Above, above is the Sanctuary
whencethe true Light flows."
She sat down and remained silent; her calm face bore no sign of the
agitation which orators
betray after their least fervid
improvisations.
Wilfrid bent toward Monsieur Becker and said in a low voice, "Who
taught her that?"
"I do not know," he answered.
"He was gentler on the Falberg," Minna whispered to herself.
Seraphita passed her hand across her eyes and then she said,
smiling:--
"You are very
thoughtful to-night, gentlemen. You treat Minna and me
as though we were men to whom you must talk
politics or commerce;
whereas we are young girls, and you ought to tell us tales while you
drink your tea. That is what we do, Monsieur Wilfrid, in our long
Norwegian evenings. Come, dear
pastor, tell me some Saga that I have
not heard,--that of Frithiof, the
chronicle that you believe and have
so often promised me. Tell us the story of the
peasant lad who owned
the ship that talked and had a soul. Come! I dream of the frigate
Ellida, the fairy with the sails young girls should navigate!"
"Since we have returned to the regions of Jarvis," said Wilfrid, whose
eyes were
fastened on Seraphita as those of a
robber, lurking in the
darkness,
fasten on the spot where he knows the jewels lie, "tell me
why you do not marry?"
"You are all born widows and widowers," she replied; "but my marriage
was arranged at my birth. I am betrothed."
"To whom?" they cried.
"Ask not my secret," she said; "I will promise, if our father permits
it, to invite you to these
mysterious nuptials."
"Will they be soon?"
"I think so."
A long silence followed these words.
"The spring has come!" said Seraphita, suddenly. "The noise of the
waters and the breaking of the ice begins. Come, let us
welcome the
first spring of the new century."
She rose, followed by Wilfrid, and together they went to a window