not
reach their outline, and I cannot comprehend them. I know that I am
dominant of the physical creation on this earth, but at those times I
feel that these great and mighty essences, whose world in which they
live and move, envelopes ours and us, and to whom our matter is as
impalpable air--I know that they and we, theirs and ours, are involved
in higher and yet higher conditions and elements, that in some
mysterious way we mutually and blindly contribute and minister to each
other."

"And what profit do you find in such communication?" asked Bart.

"It is but preparatory to try the powers, clear the vision and senses,
train and discipline the essential faculties for a communion with
this essence that may be fully revealed, and aid in the workings and
immediate government of our gross material world, and the spirits that
pertain to it more immediately, if such there are."

"And you are in doubt about that?"

"Somewhat; and yet through some such agencies came the givings forth
of the Prophets."

"You believe in the Prophets?" asked Case.

"Assuredly. The many generations which inherited from each other the
seer faculty, developed and improved, living the secluded, severe, and
simple lives of the anchorite, amid the grand and solemn silence of
mountain and desert, were enabled, by wondrous and protracted effort,
to wear through the filament--impenetrable as adamant to common
men--that screened from them the invisible future, and they told What
they saw."

"Yet they never told it so that any mortal ever understood what they
said, or could apply their visions to any passing events, and the same
givings out of these half-crazed old bards, for such they were,
have been applied to fifty different things by as many different
generations of men," said Case.

"That may have arisen, in part," said Bart, "from the dim sight of the
seer, and the difficulty of clothing extraordinary visions in the garb
of ordinary things. It is not easy, however, for the common mind
to see why, if God had a special message for His children of such
importance that He would provide a special messenger to communicate
it, and had a choice of messengers, it should reach them finally, in
a form that nobody could interpret. With God every thing is in the
present, all that has happened, and all that will, is as the now is
to us. If a man can reach the power or faculty of getting a glimpse of
things as God sees them, he would make some utterance,