“What progress are you making?” asked Bart, quietly.

“I am getting increase of power.  I don’t know that I need light; I think I want strength.  I hear the voices oftener, and they are wonderfully sweeter; I find that they consist of marvelous musical sounds, and I can distinguish some notes; meanings are conveyed by them.  If I could only comprehend and interpret them.  I shall in time if I can hold out.  I find as the flesh becomes more spirit-like, that this power increases.  If I only had some fine-fibred soul who could take this up where I must leave it!  Barton, you believe God communicates with men through other than his ordinary works?”

“I don’t know; I see and hear God in the wondrous symbols of nature; when they say that he speaks directly, I don’t feel so certain.  I am so made up, that the very nature, the character and quality of the evidence, is unequal to the facts to be proven, and so to produce conviction.  If a score of you were to say to me, that in the forest to-day, you saw a fallen and decayed tree arise and strike down new roots, and shoot out new branches, and unfold new foliage and flowers, I would not believe it:  Nor, though five hundred men should swear that they saw a grave heave up, and its tenant come forth to life and beauty, would I believe.  The quality of the evidence is not equal to sustain the burthen of the fact to be established, and it does not help the matter, that alleged proofs come to me through uncertain historical media.  Yet I can’t say that I disbelieve.  Who can say that there is not within us a religious spiritual faculty, or a set of faculties, that take impressions, and receive communications, not through the ordinary perceptions and convictions of the mere mind—­that sees and hears, retains and transmits, loves, hopes and worships, in a spiritual or religious atmosphere of its own; whose memories are superstitions, whose realizations are extatic visions, and whose hopes are the future of blessedness; and that it is through these faculties that religious sentiments are received, transmitted and propagated, and to which God speaks and acts, spirit to spirit, as matter to matter?  Who can tell how many sets of faculties are possible to us?  We may have developed only a few of the lowest.  I sometimes fancy that I feel the rudiments of a higher and finer set within me.  Who shall say that I have them not?”

“Go on, Barton; I like to hear you unfold yourself,” said Sartliff.

“I can’t,” said Bart, “I can only vaguely talk about what I so vaguely feel.”

“Barton,” said Sartliff, “go with me; let me impart to you what I know; perhaps you have a finer and subtler sense than I had.  At any rate I can help you.  You can be warned by my failures and blunders, and possess yourself of my small gains.  I know I have taken some steps.  I shall last long enough to place you well on the road.  You are silent.  Do you think me crazy—­mad?”