For Master Richard, then, there was no other person in the world.  There was that that fenced him from all living.  Our Saviour Christ upon the rood spoke to His Blessed Mother before His dereliction, but not again afterwards.  There was no more that He might say to her, or to His cousin, John.

This, then, was the state in which Master Richard lay—­that specialissimus of God Almighty, to whom the Divine Love and Majesty was as breath to his nostrils, meat to his mouth, and water to his body.  I an say no more on that point.

As to the fault by which it seemed that he had come to that state, it was the most terrible of all sins, which is Presumption.  Holy Church sets before us Humility as the chief of virtues, to shew us that Presumption is the chief of vices.  A man may be an adulterer or a murderer or a sacrilegious person, and yet by Humility may find mercy.  But a man may be chaste and stainless in all his works, and a worshipper of God, but without Humility he cannot come to glory. [Sir John proceeds in this strain for several pages, illustrating his point by the cases of Lucifer, Nabuchodonosor, Judas Iscariot, King Herod, and others.]....

Now the matter in which it seemed to Master Richard that he had sinned the sin of Presumption was the old matter of the tidings he had borne to the King.  It was not that the tidings were false, for he knew them for true; but yet that he had been presumptuous in bearing them.  It was as though a stander-by had overheard tidings given by a king to his servant, and had presumed to hear them himself, as it were Achimaas the son of Sadoc. [I supposed that this obscure reference is to 2 Kings xviii. 19.] And more than that, that he had presumed in thinking that he could be such a man as our Lord would call to such an office.  He had set himself, it appeared, far above his fellows in even listening to our Saviour’s voice; he should rather have cried with saint Peter, Exi a me quia homo peccator sum Domine. ["Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Luke v. 8.)]

It was this sin that had driven him from God’s Presence.  Our Lord had bestowed on him wonderful gifts of grace.  He had visited him as He visits few others and had led him in the Way of Union, and he had followed, triumphing in this, giving God the glory in words only, until he had fallen as it seemed from the height of presumption to the depth of despair, and lay here now, excluded from the Majesty that he desired.

* * * * *

Now, here is a very wonderful thing, and I know not if I can make it clear.

You understand, my children, a little of what I heard from Master Richard’s lips—­of what it was that he suffered.  But although all this was upon him, he perceived afterwards, though not at the time, that there was something in him that had not yielded to the agony.  His body was broken, and his mind amazed, and his soul obscured in this Night, yet there was one power more, that we name the Will (and that is the very essence of man, by which he shall be judged), that had not yet sunk or cried out that it was so as the fiend suggested.