A new party arrived, bringing a snowy fleeced lamb to be offered in sacrifice.  It was decked with wreaths, and bleated piteously.  Presently it was killed, and its blood was caught in vessels to be taken home and smeared on doors and walls to drive away blight and pestilence from the dwellings of men.  While this was being done, the crowd looked on carelessly or curiously.  But Bertram and Atma noticed that the man who had made this offering looked upwards with famished eyes and despairing, and a groan escaped his lips, and to Bertram it seemed as if he said: 

“Behold I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him.”

They stood apart, watching the scene.  Then Atma presented his gift for the enriching of the shrine, and withdrawing aside he knelt on the grass and prayed,

“Bright God and Only God! 
Not to be understood! 
Illume the darkened twilight of thine earth;
The dewdrop of so little worth
Is garnished from the riches of the sun;
Lead me from shadowy things to things that be,
Lest, all undone,
I lose in dreams my dream’s reality;
Thy Home is in the Fatherland of Light,
Strong God and Bright! 
In still beatitude and boundless might! 
I veil mine eyes,
Thy holy Quietness I seek with sighs.”

Said Bertram, “The earth has not a spectacle more fraught with meaning than this; the acknowledged monarch of terrestrial things bowing in dread—­a dread of what? of that voice in his breast which, being silent, is yet the loudest thing he knows?  Why is the innocence of that sacrificial lamb so pathetic to my sight?  Why should religious rites in which I do not participate move me strangely and deeply?”

“These things are a shadow,” said Atma, “and a shadow is created by a fact.”

“I join in your prayer,” said Bertram. “’Lead me from shadowy things to things that be.’  Types are not for him who believes that the horizon of his sight bounds the possible.”

“No,” replied Atma, “better reject the image than accept it as the end of our desire.  The faith of my fathers, which grasped after Truth, teaches me that if the outward semblance of divine verities lead captive not only my senses, to which its appeal is made, but my heart’s allegiance, I am guilty of idolatry.”

“How fair,” said Bertram, “must be the thing imaged by earth’s loveliest pageantry!  What must be the song of whose melody broken snatches and stray notes reach us in the golden speech of those endowed with hearing to catch its echoes!  What harmony of beatitude is taught by the mystery of heavenly colour!  How dull must be our faculties, or how distant the bliss for which our souls yearn as from behind a lattice, seeing only as in a mirror of burnished silver, which, though it be never so bright, reflects but dimly!  How unutterable are our transitory glimpses of eternal possibilities!”

“Therein,” said Atma, “may lie the reason why evanescent beauty stirs us most.  It may be more heavenly in meaning or affinity than things that remain.  This has sometimes perplexed me.