And, after all, it was not her voice Narcissus had heard in the church.  It was but the still sweeter voice of his own heart.

CHAPTER VI

THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS

I hope it will be allowed to me that I treat the Reader with all respectful courtesy, and that I am well bred enough to assume him familiar with all manner of exquisite experience, though in my heart I may be no less convinced that he has probably gone through life with nothing worth calling experience whatsoever.  It is our jaunty modern fashion, and I follow it so far as I am able.  I take for granted, for instance, that every man has at one time or another—­in his salad days, you know, before he was embarked in his particular provision business—­had foolish yearnings towards poesy.  I respect the mythical dreams of his ‘young days’; I assume that he has been really in love; but, pray press me not too curiously as to whether I believe it all, as to whether I really imagine that his youth knew other dreams than those of the foolish young ‘masherdom’ one meets in the train every morning, or that he has married a wife for other than purely ‘masculine’ reasons.

These matters I do not mind leaving in the form of a postulate—­let them be granted:  but that every man has at one time or another had the craze for saving the world I will not assume.  Narcissus took it very early, and though he has been silent concerning his mission for some time, and when last we heard of it had considerably modified his propaganda, he still cherishes it somewhere in secret, I have little doubt; and one may not be surprised, one of these days, to find it again bursting out ’into sudden flame.’

His spiritual experience has probably been the deepest and keenest of his life.  I do not propose to trace his evolution from Anabaptism to Agnosticism.  The steps of such development are comparatively familiar; they have been traced by greater pens than mine.  The ‘means’ may vary, but the process is uniform.

Whether a man deserts the ancestral Brahminism that has so long been ‘good enough for his parents,’ and listens to the voice of the Buddhist missionary, or joins Lucian in the seat of the scornful, shrugging at augur and philosopher alike; whether it is Voltaire, or Tom Paine, or Thomas Carlyle, or Walt Whitman, or a Socialist tract, that is the emancipator, the emancipation is all one.

The seed that is to rend the rock comes in all manner of odd, and often unremembered, ways; but somehow, it is there; rains and dews unnoticed feed it; and surely, one day the rock is rent, the light is pouring in, and we are free!  It is often a matter of anguish that, strive as we may, it is impossible to remember what helping hand it was that sowed for us.  Our fickle memory seems to convict us of ingratitude, and yet we know how far that sin is from us; and how, if those sowers could but be revealed to us, we would fall upon their necks, or at their feet.