Another element in the spiritual development of Marius is that which may be called his consciousness of an unseen companion.  Marius was constitutionally personel, and never could be satisfied with the dry light of pure reason, or with any impersonal ideal whatsoever.  For him the universe was alive in a very real sense.  At first, however, this was the vaguest of sentiments, and it needed much development before it became clear enough to act as one of the actual forces which played upon his life.  We first meet with it in connection with the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and his habit of inward conversation with himself, made possible by means of the Logos, “the reasonable spark in man, common to him with the gods.”  “There could be no inward conversation with oneself such as this, unless there were indeed some one else aware of our actual thoughts and feelings, pleased or displeased at one’s disposition of oneself.”  This, in a dim way, seemed a fundamental necessity of experience—­one of those “beliefs, without which life itself must be almost impossible, principles which had their sufficient ground of evidence in that very fact.”  So far Marcus Aurelius.  But the conviction of some august yet friendly companionship in life beyond the veil of things seen, took form for Marius in a way far more picturesque.  The passage which describes it is one of the finest in the book, and may be given at length.

“Through a dreamy land he could see himself moving, as if in another life, and like another person, through all his fortunes and misfortunes, passing from point to point, weeping, delighted, escaping from various dangers.  That prospect brought him, first of all, an impulse of lively gratitude:  it was as if he must look round for some one else to share his joy with:  for some one to whom he might tell the thing, for his own relief.  Companionship, indeed, familiarity with others, gifted in this way or that, or at least pleasant to him, had been, through one or another long span of it, the chief delight of the journey.  And was it only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not been—­besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude which in spite of ardent friendship he had perhaps loved best of all things—­some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was there at all?  Must not the whole world around have faded away for him altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?” One can see in this sense of constant companionship the untranslated and indeed the unexamined Christian doctrine of God.  And, because this God is responsive to all the many-sided human experience which reveals Him, it will be an actual preparation not for Theism only, but for that complexity in unity known as the Christian Trinity.  Nothing could better summarise this whole achievement in religion than Pater’s apt sentence, “To have apprehended the Great Ideal, so palpably that it defined personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid the shadows of the world.”