He paused a moment.  His voice boomed musically about the room, even after he ceased speaking.  Bewildered, wondering, delighted, Spinrobin drank in every word.  How well he knew it all.

“Now,” resumed the clergyman, lowering his tone unconsciously, “the first part of my discovery lies in this:  that I have learned to pronounce the ordinary names of things and people in such a way as to lead me to their true, inner ones—­”

“But,” interrupted Spinrobin irrepressibly, “how in the name of—?”

“Hush!” cried Skale quickly.  “Never again call upon a mighty name—­in vain.  It is dangerous.  Concentrate your mind upon what I now tell you, and you shall understand a part, at least, of my discovery.  As I was saying, I have learned how to find the true name by means of the false; and understand, if you can, that to pronounce a true name correctly means to participate in its very life, to vibrate with its essential nature, to learn the ultimate secret of its inmost being.  For our true names are the sounds originally uttered by the ‘Word’ of God when He created us, or ‘called’ us into Being out of the void of infinite silence, and to repeat them correctly means literally—­to—­speak—­with—­His—­Voice.  It is to speak the truth.”  The clergyman dropped his tone to an awed whisper.  “Words are the veils of Being; to speak them truly is to lift a corner of the veil.”

“What a glory!  What a thing!” exclaimed the other under his breath, trying to keep his mind steady, but losing control of language in the attempt.  The great sentences seemed to change the little room into a temple where sacred things were about to reveal themselves.  Spinrobin now understood in a measure why Mr. Skale’s utterance of his own name and that of Miriam had sounded grand.  Behind each he had touched the true name and made it echo.

The clergyman’s voice brought his thoughts back from distances in that inner prairie of his youth where they had lost themselves.

“For all of us,” he was repeating with rapt expression in his shining eyes, “are Sounds in the mighty music the universe sings to God, whose Voice it was that first produced us, and of whose awful resonance we are echoes therefore in harmony or disharmony.”  A look of power passed into his great visage.  Spinrobin’s imagination, in spite of the efforts that he made, fluttered with broken wings behind the swift words.  A flash of the former terror stirred in the depths of him.  The man was at the heels of knowledge it is not safe for humanity to seek....

“Yes,” he continued, directing his gaze again upon the other, “that is a part of my discovery, though only a part, mind.  By repeating your outer name in a certain way until it disappears in the mind, I can arrive at the real name within.  And to utter it is to call upon the secret soul—­to summon it from its lair.  ’I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by name.’  You remember the texts? ‘I know thee by name,’