“This is no vision?” said the bishop, “no dream that will pass away?”

“Am I not here beside you?”

(5)

The bishop was anxious to be very clear.  Things that had been shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for themselves.

“The God I saw in my vision—­He is not yet manifest in the world?”

“He comes.  He is in the world, but he is not yet manifested.  He whom you saw in your vision will speedily be manifest in the world.  To you this vision is given of the things that come.  The world is already glowing with God.  Mankind is like a smouldering fire that will presently, in quite a little time, burst out into flame.

“In your former vision I showed you God,” said the Angel.  “This time I will show you certain signs of the coming of God.  And then you will understand the place you hold in the world and the task that is required of you.”

(6)

And as the Angel spoke he lifted up his hands with the palms upward, and there appeared above them a little round cloud, that grew denser until it had the likeness of a silver sphere.  It was a mirror in the form of a ball, but a mirror not shining uniformly; it was discoloured with greyish patches that had a familiar shape.  It circled slowly upon the Angel’s hands.  It seemed no greater than the compass of a human skull, and yet it was as great as the earth.  Indeed it showed the whole earth.  It was the earth.  The hands of the Angel vanished out of sight, dissolved and vanished, and the spinning world hung free.  All about the bishop the velvet darkness broke into glittering points that shaped out the constellations, and nearest to them, so near as to seem only a few million miles away in the great emptiness into which everything had resolved itself, shone the sun, a ball of red-tongued fires.  The Angel was but a voice now; the bishop and the Angel were somewhere aloof from and yet accessible to the circling silver sphere.

At the time all that happened seemed to happen quite naturally, as things happen in a dream.  It was only later, when all this was a matter of memory, that the bishop realized how strange and incomprehensible his vision had been.  The sphere was the earth with all its continents and seas, its ships and cities, its country-sides and mountain ranges.  It was so small that he could see it all at once, and so great and full that he could see everything in it.  He could see great countries like little patches upon it, and at the same time he could see the faces of the men upon the highways, he could see the feelings in men’s hearts and the thoughts in their minds.  But it did not seem in any way wonderful to the bishop that so he should see those things, or that it was to him that these things were shown.

“This is the whole world,” he said.

“This is the vision of the world,” the Angel answered.