Therefore they saw only that which their nature, sustained by the strength of the spirit, permitted them to see; they heard that only which they were able to hear.

And yet, though thus protected, they shuddered when the Voice of the anguished soul broke forth above them—­the prayer of the Spirit awaiting Life and imploring it with a cry.

That cry froze them to the very marrow of their bones.

The Spirit knocked at the sacred portal.  “What wilt thou?” answered a choir, whose question echoed among the worlds.  “To go to God.”  “Hast thou conquered?” “I have conquered the flesh through abstinence, I have conquered false knowledge by humility, I have conquered pride by charity, I have conquered the earth by love; I have paid my dues by suffering, I am purified in the fires of faith, I have longed for Life by prayer:  I wait in adoration, and I am resigned.”

No answer came.

“God’s will be done!” answered the Spirit, believing that he was about to be rejected.

His tears flowed and fell like dew upon the heads of the two kneeling witnesses, who trembled before the justice of God.

Suddenly the trumpets sounded,—­the last trumpets of Victory won by the Angel in this last trial.  The reverberation passed through space as sound through its echo, filling it, and shaking the universe which Wilfrid and Minna felt like an atom beneath their feet.  They trembled under an anguish caused by the dread of the mystery about to be accomplished.

A great movement took place, as though the Eternal Legions, putting themselves in motion, were passing upward in spiral columns.  The worlds revolved like clouds driven by a furious wind.  It was all rapid.

Suddenly the veils were rent away.  They saw on high as it were a star, incomparably more lustrous than the most luminous of material stars, which detached itself, and fell like a thunderbolt, dazzling as lightning.  Its passage paled the faces of the pair, who thought it to be the Light Itself.

It was the Messenger of good tidings, the plume of whose helmet was a flame of Life.

Behind him lay the swath of his way gleaming with a flood of the lights through which he passed.

He bore a palm and a sword.  He touched the Spirit with the palm, and the Spirit was transfigured.  Its white wings noiselessly unfolded.

This communication of the Light, changing the Spirit into a Seraph and clothing it with a glorious form, a celestial armor, poured down such effulgent rays that the two Seers were paralyzed.

Like the three apostles to whom Jesus showed himself, they felt the dead weight of their bodies which denied them a complete and cloudless intuition of the Word and the True Life.

They comprehended the nakedness of their souls; they were able to measure the poverty of their light by comparing it—­a humbling task —­with the halo of the Seraph.