predominate over William Sharp, until finally she controlled and radically changed him into her own likeness.  He passes on to the volume entitled The Divine Adventure, which interprets the spirit of Columba.  Nature and the spiritual meet in the psychic phase into which Sharp passed, not only in the poetic and native sense, but in a more literal sense than that.  For the Green Life continually leads those who are akin to it into opportunities of psychical research among obscure and mysterious forces which are yet very potent.  With a nature like his it was inevitable that he should be eventually lured irresistibly into the enchanted forest, where spirit is more and more the one certainty of existence.

For most of us there is another guide into the spirit land.  In the region of the spectral and occult many of us are puzzled and ill at ease, but we all, in some degree, understand the meaning of ordinary human love.  Even the most commonplace nature has its magical hours now and then, or at least has had them and has not forgotten; and it is love that “leads us with a gentle hand into the silent land.”  This may form a bond of union between Fiona Macleod and many who are mystified rather than enlightened by psychic phenomena in the technical meaning of the phrase.  Here, perhaps, we find the key to the double personality which has been so interesting in this whole study.  It was William Sharp who chose for his tombstone the inscription, “Love is more great than we conceive, and death is the keeper of unknown redemptions.”  Fiona’s work, too, is full of the latent potency of love.  Like Marius, she has perceived an unseen companion walking with men through the gloom and brilliance of the West and North, and sometimes her heart is so full that it cannot find utterance at all.  In the “dream state,” that which is mere nature for the scientist reveals itself, obscurely indeed and yet insistently, as very God.  God is dwelling in Fiona.  He is smiling in all sunsets.  He is filling the universe with His breath and holding us all in His “Mighty Moulding Hand.”

The relation in which all this stands to Christianity is a very curious question.  The splendour, beauty, and spirituality of it all are evident enough, but the references to anything like dogmatic or definite Christian doctrine are confusing and obscure.  Perhaps it was impossible that one so literally a child of nature, and who had led such an open-air life from his childhood, could possibly have done otherwise than to rebel.  It was the gipsy in him that revolted against Christianity and every other form and convention of civilised life, and claimed a freedom far beyond any which he ever used.  We read that in his sixth year, when already he found the God of the pulpit remote and forbidding, he was nevertheless conscious of a benign and beautiful presence.  On the shore of Loch Long he built a little altar of rough stones beneath a swaying pine, and laid an offering of white flowers upon it.  In the college days he turned still more definitely against orthodox Presbyterianism; but he retained all along, not only belief in the central truths that underlie all religions, but great reverence and affection for them.