It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should seem of more importance than great and final things.  For man is a creature thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from the blindness of individuality to the knowledge of a common end.  We stand deep in the engagements of our individual lives looking up to God, and only realizing in our moments of exaltation that through God we can escape from and rule and alter the whole world-wide scheme of individual lives.  Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to man’s hand.  Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest barbarities of thought.  We are only beginning to realize that God is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here continually; we perceive him and then again we are blind to him.  God is the last thing added to the completeness of human life.  To most His presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat through us for ever from the sun.  All this appeared now so clear and necessary to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found the quality of contradiction in these manifest facts.

In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope saw as a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such thing as a continuous living presence of God in our lives.  That is an unreasonable desire.  There is no permanent exaltation of belief.  It is contrary to the nature of life.  One cannot keep actively believing in and realizing God round all the twenty-four hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole cycle of night and day, day after day.  If it were possible so to apprehend God without cessation, life would dissolve in religious ecstasy.  But nothing human has ever had the power to hold the curtain of sense continually aside and retain the light of God always.  We must get along by remembering our moments of assurance.  Even Jesus himself, leader of all those who have hailed the coming kingdom of God, had cried upon the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The business of life on earth, life itself, is a thing curtained off, as it were, from such immediate convictions.  That is in the constitution of life.  Our ordinary state of belief, even when we are free from doubt, is necessarily far removed from the intuitive certainty of sight and hearing.  It is a persuasion, it falls far short of perception....

“We don’t know directly,” Scrope said to himself with a checking gesture of the hand, “we don’t see.  We can’t.  We hold on to the remembered glimpse, we go over our reasons."...