r a howler of Turabu or a
member of the French Academy, man, in this penumbra of faith and
doubt, of superstition and imagination, is much the same. 'The higher
powers in us,' says Novalis, 'which one day, as Genii, shall fulfil
our will, are for the present, Muses, which refresh us on our toilsome
course with sweet remembrances.' And the jinn, the fairies, the
angels, the muses, are as young and vivacious to-day as they were in
the Arabian and Gaelic Ages of Romance.

"But whether Mother Church or Poetry or Philosophy or Music be the
magic-medium, the result is much the same if the motive be not
religiously sincere, sincerely religious, piously pure, lofty, and
humane. Ay, my Larva-Hermit, with all his bigotry and straitness of
soul, stands higher than most of your artists and poets and musicians
of the present day. For a life sincerely spent between the Temple and
the Vineyard, between devotion and honest labour, producing to one man
of all mankind some positive good, is not to be compared with the life
which oscillates continuously between egoism and vanity, quackery and
cowardice, selfishness and pretence, and which never rises, do what it
may, above the larva state....

"Let every one cultivate with pious sincerity some such vineyard
as my Hermit's and the world will not further need reform. For
through all the vapour and mist of his ascetic theology, through the
tortuous chasm of his eremitic logic, through the bigotry and crass
superstition of his soul, I can always see the Vineyard on the one
side of his cell, and the Church on the other, and say to myself:
Here be a man who is never idle; here be one who loves the leisure
praised by Socrates, and hates the sluggishness which Iblis decks and
titivates. And if he crawls between his Church and his Vineyard, and
burrows in both for a solution of life, nay, spins in both the cocoon
of his ideal, he ought not to be judged from on high. Come thou near
him; descend; descend a little and see: has he not a task, and
though it be of the taper-under-the-bushel kind? Has he not a faith
and a sincerity which in a Worm of the Earth ought to be reckoned
sublime? 'If there were sorrow in heaven,' he once said to me, 'how
many there would continuously lament the time they wasted in this
world?'

"O my Brothers, build your Temples and have your Vineyards, even
though it be in the rocky wilderness."

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BOOK THE THIRD

IN KULMAKAN

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