"Was John at all, and did he say he saw?" (vol vii. p. 128.)
and will believe nothing till the proof be proved.
This prophetic self-consciousness does not, however, displace the memory of his former self. John knows himself the man who _heard_ and _saw_--receiving the words of Christ from His own mouth, and enduring those glories of apocalyptic vision which he marvels that he could bear, and live; seeing truths already plain grow of their own strength: and those he guessed as points expanding into stars. And the life-long faith regains its active power as the doubting future takes shape before him; as he sees its children
"... stand conversing, each new face Either in fields, of yellow summer eves, On islets yet unnamed amid the sea; Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico Out of the crowd in some enormous town Where now the larks sing in a solitude: Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:...." (vol. vii. p. 134.)
and he hears them questioning truths of deeper import than those of his own life and work.
The subsequent monologue is an earnest endeavour to answer those questionings, which he sets forth, in order that he may do so; his eloquence being perhaps the more pathetic, that in the depth of his own conviction--in his loving desire to impart it--he assumes a great deal of what he tries to prove. "He has _seen_ it all--the miracle of that life and death; the need, and yet the transiency, of death and sin; the constant presence of the Divine love; those things which not only _were_ to him, but _are_. And he is called upon to prove it to those who _cannot see_: whose spirit is darkened by the veil of fleshly strength, while his own lies all but bare to the contact of the Heavenly light. He must needs be as an optic-glass, bringing those things before them, not in confusing nearness, but at the right historic distance from the eye."
"Life," he admits, "is given to us that we may learn the truth. But the soul does not learn from it as the flesh does. For the flesh has little time to stay, and must gain its lesson once and for all. Man needs no second proof of the worth of fire: once found, he would not part with it for gold. But the highest spiritual certainty is not like our conviction of a bodily fact; and though we know the worth of Christ as we know the preciousness of fire, we may not in like manner grasp this truth, acknowledging it in our lives. He--John--in whose sight his Lord had been transfigured, had walked upon the waters, and raised the dead to life: _he, too_, forsook Him when the 'noise' and 'torchlight,' and the 'sudden Roman faces,' and the 'violent hands' were upon them...."