CHAPTER IV

THE CLOUDS OF THE SANCTUARY

There are pageants in which all the material splendors that man arrays
co-operate. Nations of slaves and divers have searched the sands of
ocean and the bowels of earth for the pearls and diamonds which adorn
the spectators. Transmitted as heirlooms from generation to
generation, these treasures have shone on consecrated brows and could
be the most faithful of historians had they speech. They know the joys
and sorrows of the great and those of the small. Everywhere do they
go; they are worn with pride at festivals, carried in despair to
usurers, borne off in triumph amid blood and pillage, enshrined in
masterpieces conceived by art for their protection. None, except the
pearl of Cleopatra, has been lost. The Great and the Fortunate
assemble to witness the coronation of some king, whose trappings are
the work of men's hands, but the purple of whose raiment is less
glorious than that of the flowers of the field. These festivals,
splendid in light, bathed in music which the hand of man creates, aye,
all the triumphs of that hand are subdued by a thought, crushed by a
sentiment. The Mind can illumine in a man and round a man a light more
vivid, can open his ear to more melodious harmonies, can seat him on
clouds of shining constellations and teach him to question them. The
Heart can do still greater things. Man may come into the presence of
one sole being and find in a single word, a single look, an influence
so weighty to bear, of so luminous a light, so penetrating a sound,
that he succumbs and kneels before it. The most real of all splendors
are not in outward things, they are within us. A single secret of
science is a realm of wonders to the man of learning. Do the trumpets