It lies within our power to increase these communications. In the life of every man has there been a day when the heavens opened of their own accord, and it is almost always from that very instant that dates his true spiritual personality. It is doubtless at that instant that are formed the invisible, eternal features that we reveal, though we know it not, to angels and to souls. But with most men it is chance alone that has caused the heavens to open; and they have not chosen the face whereby the angels know them in the infinite, nor have they understood how to ennoble and purify its features—which do indeed but owe their being to an accidental joy or sadness, an accidental thought or fear.
Our veritable birth dates from the day when, for the first time, we feel at the deepest of us that there is something grave and unexpected in life. Some there are who realise suddenly that they are not alone under the sky. To others will it be brusquely revealed, while shedding a tear or giving a kiss, that ‘the source of all that is good and holy from the universe up to God is hidden behind a night, full of too distant stars’; a third will see a divine hand stretched forth between his joy and his misfortune; and yet another will have understood that it is the dead who are in the right. One will have had pity, another will have admired or been afraid. Often does it need almost nothing, a word, a gesture, a little thing that is not even a thought. ‘Before, I loved thee as a brother, John,’ says one of Shakespeare’s heroes, admiring the other’s action, ‘but now I do respect thee as my soul.’ On that day it is probable that a being will have come into the world.
We can be born thus more than once; and each birth brings us a little nearer to our God. But most of us are content to wait till an event, charged with almost irresistible radiance, intrudes itself violently upon our darkness, and enlightens us, in our despite. We await I know not what happy coincidence, when it may so come about that the eyes of our soul shall be open at the very moment that something extraordinary takes place. But in everything that happens is there light; and the greatness of the greatest of men has but consisted in that they had trained their eyes to be open to every ray of this light. Is it indeed essential that your mother should breathe her last in your arms, that your children should perish in a shipwreck, and that you yourself should pass by the side of death, for you at length to understand that you have your being in an incomprehensible world where you shall be for ever, where an unseen God, who is eternally alone, dwells with His creatures? Must your betrothed die in a fire, or disappear before your eyes in the green depths of the ocean, for it to be revealed to you for an instant that the last limits of the kingdom of love transcend perhaps the scarcely visible flames of Mira, Altair or Berenice’s tresses? Had your eyes been open, might you not have beheld in a kiss that which to-day you perceive in a catastrophe? Are the divine recollections that slumber in our souls to be awakened only by the lance-thrusts of grief? The sage needs no such violent arousing. He sees a tear, a maiden’s gesture, a drop of water that falls; he listens to a passing thought, presses a brother’s hand, approaches a lip, with open eyes and open soul. He never ceases to behold that of which you have caught but a passing glimpse; and a smile will readily tell him all that it needed a tempest, or even the hand of death, to reveal to you.