The Light Invisible

THE old priest was silent for a moment.The song of a great bee boomed up out of the distance and ceased as the white bell of a flowerbeside me drooped suddenly under his weight."I have not made myself clear," said the priest again. "Let me think a minute." And he leanedback.We were sitting on a little red-tiled platform in his garden, in a sheltered angle of the wall.

On oneside of us rose the old irregular house, with its latticed windows, and its lichened roofs culminatingin a bell-turret; on the other I looked across the pleasant garden where great scarlet poppies hunglike motionless flames in the hot June sunshine, to the tall living wall of yew, beyond which rose theheavy green masses of an elm in which a pigeon lamented, and above all a tender blue sky.

Thepriest was looking out steadily before him with great childlike eyes that shone strangely in his thinface under his white hair.

He was dressed in an old cassock that showed worn and green in the highlights."No," he said presently, "it is not faith that I mean; it is only an intense form of the gift ofspiritual perception that God has given me; which gift indeed is common to us all in our measure.

Itis the faculty by which we verify for ourselves what we have received on authority and hold by faith.Spiritual life consists partly in exercising this faculty.

Well, then, this form of that faculty God hasbeen pleased to bestow upon me, just as He has been pleased to bestow on you a keen power ofseeing and enjoying beauty where others perhaps see none; this is called artistic perception.

It is nosort of credit to you or to me, any more than is the colour of our eyes, or a faculty for mathematics,or an athletic body."Now in my case, in which you are pleased to be interested, the perception occasionally is so keenthat the spiritual world appears to me as visible as what we call the natural world.

In such moments,although I generally know the difference between the spiritual and the natural, yet they appear to mesimultaneously, as if on the same plane.

It depends on my choice as to which of the two I see themore clearly."Let me explain a little.

It is a question of focus. A few minutes ago you were staring at the sky,but you did not see the sky.

Your own thought lay before you instead. Then I spoke to you, and youstarted a little and looked at me; and you saw me, and your thought vanished.

Now can youunderstand me if I say that these sudden glimpses that God has granted me, were as though whenyou looked at the sky, you saw both the sky and your thought at once, on the same plane, as I havesaid? Or think of it in another way.