This appeared to him to be a revelation which he could not comprehend;
it seemed to be such an inevitable logical sequence--conviction and
profession.

"I am attracted by everything," he said, "in your Church. The whole
thing appears to be such a well-connected scheme, so unlike the religion
in which I was born and educated, where you had to be forever searching
after a missing link. And then your Church seems to be founded on
love--love of a supernal kind, of course, and almost unintelligible; but
it is the golden chain in the string of pearls. You will have noticed
how rapidly sometimes the mind makes comparisons. Well, often, at our
station over there, I have thought, as I searched the sea, that we
Protestants look at God through the large end of a telescope and throw
Him afar off, and make Him very small and insignificant; whilst you look
at Him through the narrower end, and magnify Him and bring Him near. Our
God--that is, the God in whom I was taught to believe--is the God of
Sinai, and our Christ is the historic Christ; but that won't do for a
humanity that is ever querulous for God, and you have found the secret."

I was quite astonished at the solemn, thoughtful manner in which this
young fellow spoke, and his words were so full of feeling and
self-sympathy for his great privation. He was silent for a long time,
smoking freely, whilst I was pondering many things, mostly in humility
for our slow appreciation of the great gift of divine faith. At last, he
said:--

"I do not quite follow you, sir, in your remark about a sixth sense; for
this is not a question of sense, but of the soul."

We were now getting into deep water, and when an old gentleman hasn't
opened a book of philosophy for nearly thirty years, he may be well
excused for a certain timidity in approaching these deep questions. But,
"keep to the metaphorical" has always been a great rule of mine, which
never failed me.

"Let me explain," I said. "Have you ever been to an ophthalmic hospital
or a blind asylum?"

"Yes," he replied, "principally abroad."

"Well," I continued, "you might have noticed various forms of the dread
disease of blindness. Some are cases of cataract; in some the entire
ball is removed; some have partial sight behind the ugly film. But the
most pathetic case to my mind is that of the young boy or girl who comes
toward you, looking steadily at you with large, luminous eyes, the iris
perfectly clear, the pupil normally di