And it was clear too just because God is thus manifest like the momentary drawing of a curtain, sometimes to this man for a time and sometimes to that, but never continuously to any, and because the perception of him depends upon the ability and quality of the perceiver, because to the intellectual man God is necessarily a formula, to the active man a will and a commandment, and to the emotional man love, there can be no creed defining him for all men, and no ritual and special forms of service to justify a priesthood.  “God is God,” he whispered to himself, and the phrase seemed to him the discovery of a sufficient creed.  God is his own definition; there is no other definition of God.  Scrope had troubled himself with endless arguments whether God was a person, whether he was concerned with personal troubles, whether he loved, whether he was finite.  It were as reasonable to argue whether God was a frog or a rock or a tree.  He had imagined God as a figure of youth and courage, had perceived him as an effulgence of leadership, a captain like the sun.  The vision of his drug-quickened mind had but symbolized what was otherwise inexpressible.  Of that he was now sure.  He had not seen the invisible but only its sign and visible likeness.  He knew now that all such presentations were true and that all such presentations were false.  Just as much and just as little was God the darkness and the brightness of the ripples under the bows of the distant boat, the black beauty of the leaves and twigs of those trees now acid-clear against the flushed and deepening sky.  These riddles of the profundities were beyond the compass of common living.  They were beyond the needs of common living.  He was but a little earth parasite, sitting idle in the darkling day, trying to understand his infinitesimal functions on a minor planet.  Within the compass of terrestrial living God showed himself in its own terms.  The life of man on earth was a struggle for unity of spirit and for unity with his kind, and the aspect of God that alone mattered to man was a unifying kingship without and within.  So long as men were men, so would they see God.  Only when they reached the crest could they begin to look beyond.  So we knew God, so God was to us; since we struggled, he led our struggle, since we were finite and mortal he defined an aim, his personality was the answer to our personality; but God, except in so far as he was to us, remained inaccessible, inexplicable, wonderful, shining through beauty, shining beyond research, greater than time or space, above good and evil and pain and pleasure.

(12)

Serope’s mind was saturated as it had never been before by his sense of the immediate presence of God.  He floated in that realization.  He was not so much thinking now as conversing starkly with the divine interlocutor, who penetrated all things and saw into and illuminated every recess of his mind.  He spread out his ideas to the test of this presence; he brought out his hazards and interpretations that this light might judge them.