arm. One of the reasons
why virtue and goodness are not more attractive is because they get
into the hands of people without lightness or humour, and even without
courtesy; and thus the pursuit of virtue seems not only to the young,
but to many older people, to be a boring occupation, and to be
conducted in an atmosphere heavy with disapproval, with dreariness and
dulness and tiresomeness hemming the neophyte in, like fat bulls of
Bashan. It is because I should like to rescue goodness, which is the
best thing in the world, next to love, from these growing influences,
that I have written as I have done; but there is no lurking cynicism
in my books at all, and the worst thing I can accuse myself of is a
sense of humour, perhaps whimsical and childish, which seems to me to
make a pleasant and refreshing companion, as one passes on pilgrimage
in search of what I believe to be very high and heavenly things
indeed.

XV

VISIONS

I used as a child to pore over the Apocalypse, which I thought by far
the most beautiful and absorbing of all the books of the Bible; it
seemed full of rich and dim pictures, things which I could not
interpret and did not wish to interpret, the shining of clear gem-like
walls, lonely riders, amazing monsters, sealed books, all of which
took perfectly definite shape in the childish imagination. The
consequence is that I can no more criticise it than I could criticise
old tapestries or pictures familiar from infancy. They are there, just
so, and any difference of form is inconceivable.

In one point, however, the strange visions have come to hold for me an
increased grandeur; I used to think of much of it as a sort of
dramatic performance, self-consciously enacted for the benefit of the
spectator; but now I think of it as an awful and spontaneous energy of
spiritual life going on, of which the prophet was enabled to catch a
glimpse. Those 'voices crying day and night' 'the new song that was
sung before the throne,' the cry of "Come and see"--these were but
part of a vast and urgent business, which the prophet was allowed to
overhear. It is not a silent place, that highest heaven, of indolence
and placid peace, but a scene of fierce activity and the clamour of
mighty voices.

And it is the same too of another strange scene--the Transfiguration;
not an impressive spectacle arranged for the apostles, but a peep into
the awful background behind life. Let me use a simple parable: imagine
a ma