way: but still it is a prayer. A cry for light--by no means,
certainly, like that noble one in Tennyson's "In Memoriam:"


So runs my dream. But what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language but a cry.


Yet he asks for light: perhaps he had settled already for himself--like
too many more of us--what sort of light he chose to have: but still the
eye is turned upward to the sun, not inward in conceited fancy that self
is its own illumination. He asks--surely not in vain. There was light
to be had for asking. That prayer certainly was not answered in the
letter: it may have been ere now in the spirit. And yet it is a sad
prayer enough. Poor old man, and poor old philosophy!

This he and his teachers had gained by despising the simpler and yet far
profounder doctrine of the Christian schools, that the Logos, the Divine
Teacher in whom both Christians and Heathens believed, was the very
archetype of men, and that He had proved that fact by being made flesh,
and dwelling bodily among them, that they might behold His glory, full
of grace and truth, and see that it was at once the perfection of man
and the perfection of God: that that which was most divine was most
human, and that which was most human, most divine. That was the outcome
of their metaphysic, that they had found the Absolute One; because One
existed in whom the apparent antagonism between that which is eternally
and that which becomes in time, between the ideal and the actual,
between the spiritual and the material, in a word, between God and man,