For how well we know, you and I, that in some deep way love is indeed divine; and that one and all we are vessels for that spirit.

But he went farther. Seizing my arm again, he said, "At this point the miracle happened. Without any aid from my intelligence or even my imagination, that unique person, Jesus, became an objective presence in my mind; and I saw that, though human, he was indeed God, the very God who is Love."

I moved impatiently, and the grip on my arm tightened. He continued speaking, and I listening. I began to feel that his conviction had hypnotic power. Once more, half in fantasy, half in earnestness, I prayed inwardly, "Oh God, save me from this salvation!" What was it that was happening to me?

"Do not," the Christian said, "tell me that this overwhelming vision of mine was the outcome in my mind merely of long-forgotten Christian teaching administered to me in childhood; or that it sprang from my own unconscious, figuring out for my guidance an ideal of life." He paused, searching my eyes; then continued, "I have myself considered that hypothesis, but it is not true to my actual experience. What could childhood, or my childish unconscious, give me like this shattering and remaking and entirely adult perception of the divine person?"

He released me, and again we walked. He did not notice that the rain was now tapping on our heads and shoulders, and rustling in the trees; so I steered him to shelter in the arched doorway. There we stood, between two small stone angels that prayed with joined hands and up-gazing eyes. From within, the chanting wanly sounded.

His talk had not ceased. It seemed to him, he said, that the actual life of that perfect human being unfolded before him in detail. With strange vivid- ness, as though he had seen what he described, this transmuted engineer, this newborn Christian, told me how the actual life of Christ had confronted him. He believed (remember) or at least he thought he believed, that he had actually experienced the presence of the divine lover. No wonder his words had power; and even while I rebelled, I, too, almost believed that the man Jesus must indeed have been more than man.

The engineer said that he had watched all the phases of Christ's life. First the warm-hearted and resolute child, genial with playmates; but when they tormented a crippled sparrow, and would not listen to his pleading, he would furiously rout them. Then the boy on the Temple steps, confounding with sheer sincerity of feeling and fresh intelligence all the subtleties of the elders. The young man, gay companion and unfailing friend, who lived each moment fully yet without enslavement to it; for an inner voice constantly judged it, an inner light ruthlessly illuminated it; the voice and the light of his own waking divinity. Then the young man, already old in wisdom, freed of all self-concern, self-disciplined through and through to the spirit, scornfully rejecting Satan's lure of power, intent wholly on doing what God willed of him. Then the perfected man, discovering God within himself, waking fully to his own Godhead, and his self-chosen mission. Then his few years of lucid conduct and teaching, his friendliness for all outcast persons, his fierce challenge to all heartlessness. And then his death, agonized less by bodily pain than by pity for man's blind self-wounding harshness.

While the Christian was watching Christ's life unfold (like an opening flower, he said) the adult spirit of that perfect man was constantly and overwhelmingly present to him; inwardly yet objectively, as the beloved may be present to the lover in absence.

The Christian's account of his master's life had deeply moved me. Looking back, I cannot understand why I should have been so stirred; but it did at the time seem to me that a lovely and overmastering presence confronted me through the window of the Christian's words. While an inner voice quietly warned me, another voice called me. I felt myself tottering on the brink of the Christian salvation. Yet I knew quite clearly that if I took that plunge I should be damned; and worse, I should have been false to the light.

As the Christian spoke, I had been absently looking at the features of the stone angel beside me. A forgotten artist had carved them with restraint and power. Whether Christ were God or not God, the spirit that Christ preached was excellently signified in the stone. Presently a little spider strayed across the statue's brow, traversed its eye, wandered down its nose, and from the tip launched itself into space, swaying and gyrating on its thread. It landed at last on the joined hands. Strangely this outrage did not sully the angel's glory; heightened it rather, stressing that this fair messenger was not, after all an actual, a living yet supernatural being, but inanimate stone and a symbol.