“It was better that you should go on thinking it only a simple, natural thing,” Angus said.  “And as to natural, what is natural and what is not?  Man has not learned all the laws of nature yet.  Nature’s a grand, rich, endless thing, always unrolling her scroll with writings that seem new on it.  They’re not new.  They were always written there.  But they were not unrolled.  Never a law broken, never a new law, only laws read with stronger eyes.”

Angus and I had always been very fond of the Bible—­the strange old temple of wonders, full of all the poems and tragedies and histories of man, his hates and battles and loves and follies, and of the Wisdom of the universe and the promises of the splendors of it, and which even those of us who think ourselves the most believing neither wholly believe nor will understand.  We had pored over and talked of it.  We had never thought of it as only a pious thing to do.  The book was to us one of the mystic, awe-inspiring, prophetic marvels of the world.

That was what made me say, half whispering:  “I have wondered and wondered what it meant—­that verse in Isaiah:  ’Behold the former things are come to pass and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.’  Perhaps it means only the unrolling of the scroll.”

“Aye, aye!” said Angus; “it is full of such deep sayings, and none of us will listen to them.”

“It has taken man eons of time,” Hector MacNairn said, thinking it out as he spoke—­“eons of time to reach the point where he is beginning to know that in every stock and stone in his path may lie hidden some power he has not yet dreamed of.  He has learned that lightning may be commanded, distance conquered, motion chained and utilized; but he, the one conscious force, has never yet begun to suspect that of all others he may be the one as yet the least explored.  How do we know that there does not lie in each of us a wholly natural but, so far, dormant power of sight—­a power to see what has been called The Unseen through all the Ages whose sightlessness has made them Dark?  Who knows when the Shadow around us may begin to clear?  Oh, we are a dull lot—­we human things—­with a queer, obstinate conceit of ourselves.”

“Complete we think we are,” Angus murmured half to himself.  “Finished creatures!  And look at us!  How many of us in a million have beauty and health and full power?  And believing that the law is that we must crumple and go to pieces hour by hour!  Who’d waste the time making a clock that went wrong as often?  Nay, nay!  We shall learn better than this as time goes on.  And we’d better be beginning and setting our minds to work on it.  ’Tis for us to do—­the minds of us.  And what’s the mind of us but the Mind that made us?  Simple and straight enough it is when once you begin to think it out.  The spirit of you sees clearer than we do, that’s all,” he said to me.  “When your mother brought you into the world she was listening to one outside calling to her, and it opened the way for you.”