“Well, some time ago I had a sight of her; she had died, and entered this world of ours.  She was in a very different place from this, but she thought of me without ceasing, and her desire prevailed.  I saw her, though I was hidden from her, and looked into her heart, and discerned that the one thing which spoiled her joy was that I was parted from her.

“And after that I had no more delight in my security.  I began to suffer and to yearn.  And then, little by little, I began to see that it is love after all which binds us together, and which draws us to God; but my difficulty is this, that I still believe that my faith is true; and if that is true, then other faiths cannot be true also, and then I fall into sad bewilderment and despair.”  He stopped and looked at me fixedly.

“But,” I said, “if I may carry the thought further, might not all be true?  Two men may be very unlike each other in form and face and thought—­yet both are very man.  It would be foolish arguing, if a man were to say, ’I am indeed a man, and because my friend is unlike me—­taller, lighter-complexioned, swifter of thought—­therefore he cannot be a man.’  Or, again, two men may travel by the same road, and see many different things, yet it is the same road they have both travelled; and one need not say to the other, ’You cannot have travelled by the same road, because you did not see the violets on the bank under the wood, or the spire that peeped through the trees at the folding of the valleys—­and therefore you are a liar and a deceiver!’ If one believes firmly in one’s own faith, one need not therefore say that all who do not hold it are perverse and wilful.  There is no excuse, indeed, for not holding to what we believe to be true, but there is no excuse either for interfering with the sincere belief of another, unless one can persuade him he is wrong.  Is not the mistake to think that one holds the truth in its entirety, and that one has no more to learn and to perceive?  I myself should welcome differences of faith, because it shows me that faith is a larger thing even than I know.  What another sees may be but a thought that is hidden from me, because the truth may be seen from a different angle.  To complain that we cannot see it all is as foolish as when the child is vexed because it cannot see the back of the moon.  And it seems to me that our duty is not to quarrel with others who see things that we do not see, but to rejoice with them, if they will allow us, and meanwhile to discern what is shown to us as faithfully as we can.”

The man heard me with a strange smile.  “Yes,” he said, “you are certainly right, and I bless the goodness that sent you hither; but when you are gone, I doubt that I shall fall back into my old perplexities, and say to myself that though men may see different parts of the same thing, they cannot see the same thing differently.”