Gabriel spoke in the midst of solemn silence.  The listeners closed their eyes as if such immensity stunned them.  They followed in imagination Gabriel’s description, but their narrowed minds wished to place a term to the infinite, and in their simplicity they imagined beyond these incalculable distances a vault of firm matter millions of leagues thick.  Surely all that strange and fantastic work must have a limit.  What was at the back of it?  And the barrier created by their imagination fell suddenly; and again they flew through space, always infinite, with ever new worlds.

Gabriel spoke of them and of their life with absolute certainty.  Spectral analysis showed the same composition in the stars as on the earth, consequently if life had arisen in our atom, most certainly it must exist in other celestial bodies, though probably in different forms; in many planets it had already ended, in many it was still to come; but surely all those millions of worlds had had, or would have, life.

Religions, wishing to explain the origin of the world, paled and trembled before the infinite.  It was like the Cathedral tower, which covered with its bulk a great part of the heavens, hiding millions of worlds, but which was of insignificant size compared to the immensity it hid, less than an infinitesimal part of a molecule—­nothing.  It seemed very great because it was close to men, concealing immensity, but when men looked above it, getting a full grasp of the infinite, they laughed at its Lilliputian pride.

“Then,” inquired timidly the old organ-blower, pointing to the Cathedral, “what is it they teach us in there?”

“Nothing,” replied Gabriel.

“And what are we—­men?” asked the Perrero.

“Nothing.”

“And the governments, the laws, and the customs of society?” inquired the bell-ringer.

“Nothing.  Nothing.”

Sagrario fixed her eyes, grown larger by her earnest contemplation of the heavens, on her uncle.

“And God,” she asked in a soft voice; “where is God?”

Gabriel stood up, leaning on the balustrade of the gallery; his figure stood out dark and clear against the starry space.

“We are God ourselves, and everything that surrounds us.  It is life with its astonishing transformations, always apparently dying, yet always being infinitely renewed.  It is this immensity that astounds us with its greatness, and that cannot be realised in our minds.  It is matter that lives, animated by the force that dwells in it, with absolute unity, without separation or duality.  Man is God, and the world is God also.”

He was silent for a moment and then added with energy: