iety in every
bosom. Then when the blasting beams shoot downwards, and with fiendish
laughter the crashing thunder-peals fall after them, we are struck to
our souls; and unless there arises the lofty consciousness of our moral
superiority, we fancy that we are delivered over to the terrors of hell
and all the powers of darkness. They are echoes of the old, unhuman
nature, but awakening voices too of the higher nature of divine
conscience within us. The mortal totters to its base; the immortal
grows more serene and recognises itself."

"Then," said Henry, "when will there be no more terror or pain, want or
evil in the universe?"

"When there is but one power, the power of conscience; when nature
becomes chaste and pure. There is but one cause of evil,--common
frailty,--and this frailty is nothing but a weak moral susceptibility,
and a deficiency in the attraction of freedom."

"Explain to me the nature of Conscience."

"I were God, could I do so; for when we comprehend it. Conscience
exists. Can you explain to me the essence of poetry?"

"A personality cannot be distinctly defined."

"How much less then the secret of the highest indivisibility. Can music
be explained to the deaf?"

"If so, would the sense itself be part of the new world opened by it?
Does one understand facts only when one has them?"

"The universe is separated into an infinite system of worlds, ever
encompassed by greater worlds. All senses are in the end but one. One
sense conducts, like one world, gradually to all worlds. But everything
has its time and its mode. Only the Person of the universe can detect
the relations sustained by our world. It is difficult to say, whether
we, within the sensuous limits of corporeity, could really augment our
world with new worlds, our sense with new senses, or whether every
increase of our knowledge, every newly acquired ability, is only to be
considered as the development of our present organization."

"Perhaps both are one," said Henry. "For my own part, I only know that
Fable is the collective instrument of my present world. Even
Conscience, that sense and world-creating power, that germ of all
Personality, appears to me like the spirit of the world-poem, like the
event of the eternal, romantic confluence of the infinitely mutable
common life.

"Dear pilgrim," Sylvester replied, "the Conscience appears in every
serious perfection, in every fashioned truth. Every inclination and
ability transformed by