inconsistencies. But such extreme states are dangerous things to
dogmatize about. Frequently they produce a certain useless and
joyless activity of the mere intellect, thought not only divorced
from hope but even from desire. And if it is impossible to
dogmatize about such states, it is still more impossible to
describe them. To this spasm of sanity and clarity in Michael's
mind succeeded a spasm of the elemental terror; the terror of the
animal in us which regards the whole universe as its enemy;
which, when it is victorious, has no pity, and so, when it is
defeated has no imaginable hope. Of that ten minutes of terror it
is not possible to speak in human words. But then again in that
damnable darkness there began to grow a strange dawn as of grey
and pale silver. And of this ultimate resignation or certainty it
is even less possible to write; it is something stranger than
hell itself; it is perhaps the last of the secrets of God. At the
highest crisis of some incurable anguish there will suddenly fall
upon the man the stillness of an insane contentment. It is not
hope, for hope is broken and romantic and concerned with the
future; this is complete and of the present. It is not faith, for
faith by its very nature is fierce, and as it were at once
doubtful and defiant; but this is simply a satisfaction. It is
not knowledge, for the intellect seems to have no particular part
in it. Nor is it (as the modern idiots would certainly say it is)
a mere numbness or negative paralysis of the powers of grief. It
is not negative in the least; it is as positive as good news. In
some sense, indeed, it is good news. It seems almost as if there
were some equality among things, some balance in all possible
contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we should
learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown
to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony.