Seaboard Parish, vol 3 | Page 2

Sometimes--perhaps generally--we see the sky as a flat dome, spangled with star-points, and painted blue. Now I see it as an awful depth of blue air, depth within depth; and the clouds before me are not passing away to the left, but sinking away from the front of me into the marvellous unknown regions, which, let philosophers say what they will about time and space,--and I daresay they are right,--are yet very awful to me. Thank God, my dear," I said, catching hold of her arm, as the terror of mere space grew upon me, "for himself. He is deeper than space, deeper than time; he is the heart of all the cube of history."
"I understand you now, husband," said my wife.
"I knew you would," I answered.
"But," she said again, "is it not something the same with the things inside us? I can't put it in words as you do. Do you understand me now?"
"I am not sure that I do. You must try again."
"You understand me well enough, only you like to make me blunder where you can talk," said my wife, putting her hand in mine. "But I will try. Sometimes, after thinking about something for a long time, you come to a conclusion about it, and you think you have settled it plain and clear to yourself, for ever and a day. You hang it upon your wall, like a picture, and are satisfied for a fortnight. But some day, when you happen to cast a look at it, you find that instead of hanging flat on the wall, your picture has gone through it--opens out into some region you don't know where--shows you far-receding distances of air and sea--in short, where you thought one question was settled for ever, a hundred are opened up for the present hour."
"Bravo, wife !" I cried in true delight. "I do indeed understand you now. You have said it better than I could ever have done. That's the plague of you women! You have been taught for centuries and centuries that there is little or nothing to be expected of you, and so you won't try. Therefore we men know no more than you do whether it is in you or not. And when you do try, instead of trying to think, you want to be in Parliament all at once."
"Do you apply that remark to me, sir?" demanded Ethelwyn.
"You must submit to bear the sins of your kind upon occasion," I answered.
"I am content to do that, so long as yours will help mine," she replied.
"Then I may go on?" I said, with interrogation.
"Till sunrise if you like. We were talking of the cubicalness--I believe you called it--of nature."
"And you capped it with the cubicalness of thought. And quite right too. There are people, as a dear friend of mine used to say, who are so accustomed to regard everything in the _flat_, as dogma cut and--not always dried my moral olfactories aver--that if you prove to them the very thing they believe, but after another mode than that they have been accustomed to, they are offended, and count you a heretic. There is no help for it. Even St. Paul's chief opposition came from the Judaizing Christians of his time, who did not believe that God could love the Gentiles, and therefore regarded him as a teacher of falsehood. We must not be fierce with them. Who knows what wickedness of their ancestors goes to account for their stupidity? For that there are stupid people, and that they are, in very consequence of their stupidity, conceited, who can deny? The worst of it is, that no man who is conceited can be convinced of the fact."
"Don't say that, Harry. That is to deny conversion."
"You are right, Ethelwyn. The moment a man is convinced of his folly, he ceases to be a fool. The moment a man is convinced of his conceit, he ceases to be conceited. But there must be a final judgment, and the true man will welcome it, even if he is to appear a convicted fool. A man's business is to see first that he is not acting the part of a fool, and next, to help any honest people who care about the matter to take heed likewise that they be not offering to pull the mote out of their brother's eye. But there are even societies established and supported by good people for the express purpose of pulling out motes.--'The Mote-Pulling Society!'--That ought to take with a certain part of the public."
"Come, come, Harry. You are absurd. Such people don't come near you."
"They can't touch me. No. But they come near good people whom I know, brandishing the long pins with which they pull the motes out, and threatening them with judgment before