But the dusk comes slowly on, merging reed and pasture and gliding stream in one indistinguishable shade; the trees stand out black against the sunset, thickening to an emerald green.  A star comes out over the dark hill, the lights begin to peep out in the windows of the clustering town as we draw nearer.  As we glide beneath the dark houses, with their gables and chimneys dark against the glowing sky, how everything that is dull and trivial and homely is blotted out by the twilight, leaving nothing but a sense of romantic beauty of mysterious peace!  The little town becomes an enchanted city full of heroic folk; the figure that leans silently over the bridge to see us pass, to what high-hearted business is he vowed, burgher or angel?  A spell is woven of shadow and falling light, and of chimes floating over meadow and stream.  Yet this sense of something remotely and unutterably beautiful, this transfiguration of life, is as real and vital an experience as the daily, dreary toil, and to be welcomed as such.  Nay, more! it is better, because it gives one a deepened sense of value, of significance, of eternal greatness, to which we must cling as firmly as we may, because it is there that the final secret lies; not in the poor struggles, the anxious delays, which are but the incidents of the voyage, and not the serene life of haven and home.

XV

SYMBOLS

The present time is an era when intellectual persons are ashamed of being credulous.  It is the perfectly natural and desirable result of the working of the scientific spirit.  Everything is relentlessly investigated, the enormous structure of natural law is being discovered to underlie all the most surprising, delicate, and apparently fortuitous processes, and no one can venture to forecast where the systematisation will end.  The result is a great inrush of bracing and invigorating candour.  It is not that our liberty of reflection and action is increased.  It is rather increasingly limited.  But at least we are growing to discern where our boundaries are, and it is deeply refreshing to find that the boundaries erected by humanity are much closer and more cramping than the boundaries determined by God.  We are no longer bound by human authority, by subjective theories, by petty tradition.  We are no longer required to tremble before thaumaturgy and conjuring and occultism.  It is true that science has hitherto confined itself mainly to the investigation of concrete phenomena; but the same process is sure to be applied to metaphysics, to sociology, to psychology; and the day will assuredly come when the human race will analyse the laws which govern progress, which regulate the exact development of religion and morality.