“I am no musician,” I returned, “to give you a musical counter to your picture.  But I see a grave man tilling the ground in peace, and the form of Truth standing behind him, and folding her wings closer and closer over and around him as he works on at his day’s labour.”

“Very pretty,” said Mr Stoddart, and said no more.

“Suppose,” I went on, “that a person knows that he has not laid hold on the truth, is that sufficient ground for his making any further assertion than that he has not found it?”

“No.  But if he has tried hard and has not found anything that he can say is true, he cannot help thinking that most likely there is no such thing.”

“Suppose,” I said, “that nobody has found the truth, is that sufficient ground for saying that nobody ever will find it? or that there is no such thing as truth to be found?  Are the ages so nearly done that no chance yet remains?  Surely if God has made us to desire the truth, He has got some truth to cast into the gulf of that desire.  Shall God create hunger and no food?  But possibly a man may be looking the wrong way for it.  You may be using the microscope, when you ought to open both eyes and lift up your head.  Or a man may be finding some truth which is feeding his soul, when he does not think he is finding any.  You know the Fairy Queen.  Think how long the Redcross Knight travelled with the Lady Truth—­Una, you know—­without learning to believe in her; and how much longer still without ever seeing her face.  For my part, may God give me strength to follow till I die.  Only I will venture to say this, that it is not by any agony of the intellect that I expect to discover her.”

Mr Stoddart sat drumming silently with his fingers, a half-smile on his face, and his eyes raised at an angle of forty-five degrees.  I felt that the enthusiasm with which I had spoken was thrown away upon him.  But I was not going to be ashamed therefore.  I would put some faith in his best nature.

“But does not,” he said, gently lowering his eyes upon mine after a moment’s pause—­“does not your choice of a profession imply that you have not to give chase to a fleeting phantom?  Do you not profess to have, and hold, and therefore teach the truth?”

“I profess only to have caught glimpses of her white garments,—­those, I mean, of the abstract truth of which you speak.  But I have seen that which is eternally beyond her:  the ideal in the real, the living truth, not the truth that I can think, but the truth that thinks itself, that thinks me, that God has thought, yea, that God is, the truth being true to itself and to God and to man—­ Christ Jesus, my Lord, who knows, and feels, and does the truth.  I have seen Him, and I am both content and unsatisfied.  For in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.  Thomas a Kempis says:  ’Cui aeternum Verbum loquitur, ille a multis opinionibus expeditur.’” (He to whom the eternal Word speaks, is set free from a press of opinions.)