Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him.  There were periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own existence—­when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.  And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire consensus of the civilised world wrong?  It was not that the world had not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two thousand years, and now pronounced it false—­false in its external credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims.  It was a lost cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the reductio ad absurdam of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises.  He was not worth killing, He and His company of the insane—­they were no more than the crowned dunces of the world’s school.  Sanity sat on the solid benches of materialism.  And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced—­so dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on another day like this—­Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani! ...  But that, at least, He never failed to cry.

One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation.  He had travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort.  Now He used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world:  He threw, as it were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.  Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity, which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of transcendence; and there God would deal with Him—­now by an articulate sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying breath of the sea.  Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so, sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work.  Yet His consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.

There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies that He had read.  His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and patched with sorrow.  His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....