‘Ill can poetry express Full many a tone of thought sublime; And painting, mute and motionless, Steals but one glance from Time. But by the mighty Actor brought, Illusion’s wedded triumphs come; Verse ceases to be airy thought, And Sculpture to be dumb.’
‘Ah!’ wrote Wentworth to her, ‘we need not despair of Divine mercy. Christ is bigger and broader than the Church. You in your way, and I in mine, have wandered far in search of such happiness as earth can give, and found it to be of little worth, and the sects look on us as sinners, because we refuse to bow to the image they have set up, or to utter their Shibboleth. I know not that it matters much. I know not that it matters anything at all. How can any man or any set of men pretend to have penetrated the full meaning of Scripture, or that they can bid stand back those as humble and patient in the pursuit of truth as themselves?’
One day when Robert Hall had been having a conversation with Sir James Mackintosh, he told a friend: ‘Sir, it was the Euphrates pouring itself into a teapot.’ If a great orator like Hall could say that of a fellow-man, what can we say of such Divine revelation as comes to us either by the experiences of actual life or by the world of nature around us, or by the written Word which was and is Life? How can we grasp it? How can we cut it up into dogmas and creeds? How can we say to any brother man, Believe as I believe, or be damned? The Churches have tried to do so and failed, even when they had at their back the terrors of Inquisition or the sword of the Civil Magistrates. They are beginning to understand that it is all up with priestcraft, and that the Church as it exists to-day everywhere is in danger; that they cannot stop the onward march of the people; that they cannot say to the waves of free thought, ‘Hitherto shall ye come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed.’ It is a kindly light that leads on, and we cannot stop. Take all the creeds, pile them one upon the top of another, and there is still a void, for the finite cannot grasp the Infinite, and man cannot by searching find out God. At the best we can but guess; at the best, and may we ever be that, we are but children crying for the light. Here we see through a glass darkly; let us humbly do our duty, and wait the time when all mystery shall be unravelled, when we shall stand face to face, when we shall know even as we are known.