turned with eagerness to the passage wherein it occurs, as given in
two of the gospels in our version. Judge my delight in discovering
that in the one gospel the whole passage was omitted by the two
oldest manuscripts, and in the other just the one word that had
troubled me, by the same two. I would not have you suppose me
foolish enough to imagine that the oldest manuscript must be the
most correct; but you will at once understand the sense of room and
air which the discovery gave me notwithstanding, and I mention it
because it goes both to account for the dream that followed and to
enforce its truth. Pray do not however imagine me a believer in
dreams more than in any other source of mental impressions. If a
dream reveal a principle, that principle is a revelation, and the
dream is neither more NOR LESS valuable than a waking thought that
does the same. The truth conveyed is the revelation. I do not deny
that facts have been learned in dreams, but I would never call the
communication of a mere fact a revelation. Truth alone, beheld as
such by the soul, is worthy of the name. Facts, however, may
themselves be the instruments of such revelation.

"The dream I am now going to tell you was clearly enough led up to
by my waking thoughts. For I had been saying to myself ere I fell
asleep: 'On the very Mount Sinai, that once burned with heavenly
fire, and resounded with the thunder of a visible Presence, now old
and cold, and swathed in the mists of legend and doubt, was
discovered the most reverend, because most ancient record of the new
dispensation which dethroned that mountain, and silenced the
thunders of the pedagogue law! Is it not possible that yet, in some
ancient convent, insignificant to the eye of the traveller as modern
Nazareth would be but for its ancient story, some one of the
original gospel-manuscripts may lie, truthful and unblotted from the