Was it
credible that there had ever been such a vision in a life so entirely
dictated by immediacy and instinct as his? We are all creatures of the
dark stream, we swim in needs and bodily impulses and small vanities; if
ever and again a bubble of spiritual imaginativeness glows out of us, it
breaks and leaves us where we were.
"Louse that I am!" he cried.
He still believed in God, without a shadow of doubt; he believed in the
God that he had seen, the high courage, the golden intention, the light
that had for a moment touched him. But what had he to do with God, he,
the loiterer, the little thing?
He was little, he was funny. His prevarications with his wife, for
example, were comic. There was no other word for him but "funny."
He rolled back again and lay staring.
"Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" What right has a
little bishop in a purple stock and doeskin breeches, who hangs back in
his palace from the very call of God, to a phrase so fine and tragic as
"the body of this death?"
He was the most unreal thing in the universe. He was a base insect
giving himself airs. What advantage has a bishop over the Praying
Mantis, that cricket which apes the attitude of piety? Does he matter
more--to God?
"To the God of the Universe, who can tell? To the God of man,--yes.
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