eat
and secret influences they must be that cause them; we must not forget
that we are only like children playing in the nursery of a palace,
while in the Council-room beneath us a debate may be going on which is
to affect the lives and happiness of thousands of households.

And therefore the more that we make up our little beliefs and ideas,
as a man folds up a little packet of food which he is to eat on a
journey, and think in so doing that we have got a satisfactory
explanation of all our aims and problems, the more utterly we are
failing to take in the significance of what is happening. We must
never allow ourselves to make up our minds, and to get our theories
comfortably settled, because then experience is at an end for us, and
we shall see no more than we expect to see. We ought rather to be
amazed and astonished, day by day, at all the wonderful and beautiful
things we encounter, the marvellous hints of loveliness which we see
in faces, woods, hills, gardens, all showing some tremendous force at
work, often thwarted, often spoiled, but still working, with an
infinity of tender patience, to make the world exquisite and fine.
There are ugly, coarse, disgusting things at work too--we cannot help
seeing that; but even many of them seem to be destroying, in
corruption and evil odour, something that ought not to be there, and
striving to be clean and pure again.

I often wonder whose was the mind that conceived the visions of the
Apocalypse; if we can trust tradition, it was a confined and exiled
Christian in a lonely island, whose spirit reached out beyond the
little crags and the beating seas of his prison, and in the seeming
silent heaven detected the gathering of monsters, the war of
relentless forces--and beyond it all the radiant energies of saints,
glad to be together and unanimous, in a place where light and beauty
at last could reign triumphant.

I know no literature more ineffably dreary than the parcelling out of
these wild and glorious visions, the attaching of them to this and
that petty human fulfilment. That is not the secret of the Apocalypse!
It is rather as a painter may draw a picture of two lovers sitting
together at evening in a latticed chamber, holding each other's hands,
gazing in each other's eyes. He is not thinking of particular persons
in an actual house; it is rather a hint of love making itself
manifest, recognising itself to be met with an answering rapture. And
what I think that the