newer, less
natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused
with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric
traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and
the maddest barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize
that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here
continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God
is the last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little
of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us
for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear and necessary
to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of
contradiction in these manifest facts.

In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as
a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a
continuous living presence of God in our lives. That is an unreasonable
desire. There is no permanent exaltation of belief. It is contrary to
the nature of life. One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing
God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake
through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day. If it were
possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in
religious ecstasy. But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the
curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.
We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance. Even Jesus
himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God,
had cried upon the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as
it were, from such immediate convictions. That is in the constitution of
life. Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt,
is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and
hearing. It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....

"We don't know directly," Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture
of the hand, "we don't see. We can't. We hold on to the remembered
glimpse, we go over our reasons."...

And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the
momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and
sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the
perception