meet them
was the face of my own child. I saw at once that he was quite safe and
happy. But I saw that he was not alone.

One towered above me, strange and dim, who held the little fellow in
His arms. When I cried out to Him, He smiled. And He did give the
child to me, and spoke with me.

CHAPTER XVI.

The natural step to knowledge is through faith. Even human science
teaches as much as this. The faith of the scholar in the theoretic
value of his facts precedes his intelligent use of them. Invention
dreams before it does. Discovery believes before it finds. Creation
imagines before it achieves.

Spiritual intelligence, when it came at last, to me, came with
something of the jar of all abnormal processes. The wholesome
movements of trust I had omitted from my soul's economy. The function
of faith was a disused thing in me. Truth had to treat me as an
undeveloped mind.

In the depth of my consciousness, I knew that, come what might, I had
for ever lost the chance to be a symmetrical healthy human creature,
whose spiritual faculties are exercised like his brain or muscle; who
has lived upon the earth, and loved it, and gathered its wealth and
sweetness and love of living into his being, as visible food whereby to
create invisible stature; whose earthly experience has carried him on,
as Nature carries growth--unconsciously, powerfully, perfectly, into a
diviner life. For ever it must remain with me that I had missed the
natural step.

If I say that the realization of knowledge was the first thing to teach
me the value of faith, I shall be understood by those who may have read
this narrative with any sort of sympathy to the present point; and, for
the rest, some wiser, better man than I must write.

I do not address those who follow these pages as I myself should once
have done. I do not hope to make myself intelligible to you, as I
would to God I could! Personal misery is intelligible, and the shock
of belated discovery. But the experience of another in matters of this
kind has not a "scientific" character.

No one can know better than I how my story will be dismissed as
something which is not "a fact."

In the times to be, it is my belief that there shall yet arise a soul,
worthier of the sacred task than I to which shall be given the perilous
and precious commission of interpreter between the visible life and the
life invisible. On this soul high privilege will be bestowed, and
awful o