neath all frailties
and activities, made her a substantial member of the divine race of
humankind.

This then was the first step.

The second consisted in an act of the intellect, followed by one of the
imagination. All men possessed that spark, she considered.... Then she
sent out her powers, sweeping with the eyes of her mind the seething
world, seeing beneath the light and dark of the two hemispheres, the
countless millions of mankind--children coming into the world, old men
leaving it, the mature rejoicing in it and their own strength. Back
through the ages she looked, through those centuries of crime and
blindness, as the race rose through savagery and superstition to a
knowledge of themselves; on through the ages yet to come, as generation
followed generation to some climax whose perfection, she told herself,
she could not fully comprehend because she was not of it. Yet, she told
herself again, that climax had already been born; the birthpangs were
over; for had not He come who was the heir of time?...

Then by a third and vivid act she realised the unity of all, the central
fire of which each spark was but a radiation--that vast passionless
divine being, realising Himself up through these centuries, one yet
many, Him whom men had called God, now no longer unknown, but recognised
as the transcendent total of themselves--Him who now, with the coming of
the new Saviour, had stirred and awakened and shown Himself as One.

And there she stayed, contemplating the vision of her mind, detaching
now this virtue, now that for particular assimilation, dwelling on her
deficiencies, seeing in the whole the fulfilment of all aspirations, the
sum of all for which men had hoped--that Spirit of Peace, so long
hindered yet generated too perpetually by the passions of the world,
forced into outline and being by the energy of individual lives,
realising itself in pulse after pulse, dominant at last, serene,
manifest, and triumphant. There she stayed, losing the sense of
individuality, merging it by a long sustained effort of the will,
drinking, as she thought, long breaths of the spirit of life and
love....

Some sound, she supposed afterwards, disturbed her, and she opened her
eyes; and there before her lay the quiet pavement, glimmering through
the dusk, the step of the sanctuary, the rostrum on the right, and the
peaceful space of darkening air above the white Mother-figure and
against the tracery of the old window. It was