At last he had to stop altogether and kneel down and fumble with the last obstinate button.

“Oh God!” he cried, “God my captain!  Wait for me!  Be patient with me!”

And as he did so God turned back and reached out his hand.  It was indeed as if he stood and smiled.  He stood and smiled as a kind man might do; he dazzled and blinded his worshipper, and yet it was manifest that he had a hand a man might clasp.

Unspeakable love and joy irradiated the whole being of the bishop as he seized God’s hand and clasped it desperately with both his own.  It was as if his nerves and arteries and all his substance were inundated with golden light....

It was again as if he merged with God and became God....

CHAPTER THE SIXTH — EXEGETICAL

(1)

Without any sense of transition the bishop found himself seated in the little North Library of the Athenaeum club and staring at the bust of John Wilson Croker.  He was sitting motionless and musing deeply.  He was questioning with a cool and steady mind whether he had seen a vision or whether he had had a dream.  If it had been a dream it had been an extraordinarily vivid and convincing dream.  He still seemed to be in the presence of God, and it perplexed him not at all that he should also be in the presence of Croker.  The feeling of mental rottenness and insecurity that had weakened his thought through the period of his illness, had gone.  He was secure again within himself.

It did not seem to matter fundamentally whether it was an experience of things without or of things within him that had happened to him.  It was clear to him that much that he had seen was at most expressive, that some was altogether symbolical.  For example, there was that sudden absurd realization of his sash and gaiters, and his perception of them as encumbrances in his pursuit of God.  But the setting and essential of the whole thing remained in his mind neither expressive nor symbolical, but as real and immediately perceived, and that was the presence and kingship of God.  God was still with him and about him and over him and sustaining him.  He was back again in his world and his ordinary life, in his clothing and his body and his club, but God had been made and remained altogether plain and manifest.

Whether an actual vision had made his conviction, or whether the conviction of his own subconscious mind had made the dream, seemed but a small matter beside the conviction that this was indeed the God he had desired and the God who must rule his life.

“The stuff?  The stuff had little to do with it.  It just cleared my head....  I have seen.  I have seen really.  I know.”

(2)

For a long time as it seemed the bishop remained wrapped in clouds of luminous meditation.  Dream or vision it did not matter; the essential thing was that he had made up his mind about God, he had found God.  Moreover, he perceived that his theological perplexities had gone.  God was higher and simpler and nearer than any theological God, than the God of the Three Creeds.  Those creeds lay about in his mind now like garments flung aside, no trace nor suspicion of divinity sustained them any longer.  And now—­Now he would go out into the world.