ng him
about, walked him back towards the wood. Bart had not seen him for
weeks, and he thought his face was thinner and more haggard, and his
eyes more cavernous than he had ever seen them.

"What progress are you making?" asked Bart, quietly.

"I am getting increase of power. I don't know that I need light;
I think I want strength. I hear the voices oftener, and they are
wonderfully sweeter; I find that they consist of marvelous musical
sounds, and I can distinguish some notes; meanings are conveyed by
them. If I could only comprehend and interpret them. I shall in time
if I can hold out. I find as the flesh becomes more spirit-like, that
this power increases. If I only had some fine-fibred soul who
could take this up where I must leave it! Barton, you believe God
communicates with men through other than his ordinary works?"

"I don't know; I see and hear God in the wondrous symbols of nature;
when they say that he speaks directly, I don't feel so certain. I am
so made up, that the very nature, the character and quality of the
evidence, is unequal to the facts to be proven, and so to produce
conviction. If a score of you were to say to me, that in the forest
to-day, you saw a fallen and decayed tree arise and strike down new
roots, and shoot out new branches, and unfold new foliage and flowers,
I would not believe it: Nor, though five hundred men should swear
that they saw a grave heave up, and its tenant come forth to life and
beauty, would I believe. The quality of the evidence is not equal to
sustain the burthen of the fact to be established, and it does not
help the matter, that alleged proofs come to me through uncertain
historical media. Yet I can't say that I disbelieve. Who can say that
there is not within us a religious spiritual faculty, or a set of
faculties, that take impressions, and receive communications,
not through the ordinary perceptions and convictions of the mere
mind--that sees and hears, retains and transmits, loves, hopes and
worships, in a spiritual or religious atmosphere of its own; whose
memories are superstitions, whose realizations are extatic visions,
and whose hopes are the future of blessedness; and that it is through
these faculties that religious sentiments are received, transmitted
and propagated, and to which God speaks and acts, spirit to spirit, as
matter to matter? Who can tell how many sets of faculties are possible
to us? We may have developed only a few of the lowest. I so