repeated by the echoes of Paradise." Then turning to me he
said:--"This is sad, this is piteous; but less would not have sufficed
for the purpose of God. Look here. Put into a Roman clepsydra one
hundred drops of water; let these run out as the sands in an hour-glass,
every drop measuring the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall
represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth part of an hour.
Now count the drops as they race along; and when the fiftieth of the
hundred is passing, behold! forty-nine are not, because already they
have perished; and fifty are not, because they are yet to come. You see
therefore how narrow, how incalculably narrow, is the true and actual
present. Of that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth part
but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to a future which is
still on the wing. It has perished, or it is not born. It was, or it is
not. Yet even this approximation to the truth is _infinitely_ false. For
again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was found to represent
the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual
present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of an
hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which
only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote,
distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which
only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the
slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore also
even this incalculable shadow from the narrowest pencil of moonlight is
more transitory than geometry can measure, or thought of angel can
overtake. The time which _is_, contracts into a mathematic point; and
even that point perishes a thousand times before we can utter its birth.
All is finite in the present; and even that finite is infinite in its
velocity of flight towards death. But in God there is nothing finite;
but in God there is nothing transitory; but in God there _can_ be
nothing that tends to death. Therefore it follows that for God there can
be no present. The future is the present of God, and to the future it is
that he sacrifices the human present. Therefore it is that he works by
earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by grief. Oh, deep is the
plowing of earthquake! Oh, deep"--(and his voice swelled like a
_sanctus_ rising from the choir of a cathedral)--"Oh, deep is the
plowing of grief! But oftentim