Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/169



the light finds its sure way to the dry seed in the depths of earth and causes it to fructify?—or how, imprisoning itself within drops of water and grains of dust, it doth change these things of ordinary matter into diamonds which queens covet? Thou art not able to 'comprehend' these simplest facts of simple nature,—and nature being but the outward reflex of God's thought, how should'st thou understand the workings of His interior Spirit which is Himself in all? Whether He create a world, or breathe the living Essence of His own Divinity into aerial atoms to be absorbed in flesh and blood, and born as Man of virginal Woman, He hath the power supreme to do such things, if such be His great pleasure. Talkest thou of miracles?—thou art thyself a miracle,—thou livest in a miracle,—the whole world is a miracle, and exists in spite of thee! Go thy ways, man; search out truth in thine own fashion; but if it should elude thee, blame not the truth which ever is, but thine own witlessness which cannot grasp it!"

A terse reasoning out of the living essence of the supreme, and an almost matchless soliloquy.

Here is another of Melchior's speeches:

"Men are pigmies,—they scuttle away in droves before a storm or the tremor of an earthquake,—they are afraid of their lives. And what are their lives? The lives of motes in a sunbeam, of gnats in a mist of miasma,—nothing more. And they will never be anything more, till they learn how to make them valuable. And that lesson will never be mastered save by the few."

It was Marie Corelli's idea in this particular