Page:Pan's Garden.djvu/296

 'A church?' he ventured. 'Some Body of belief, you surely mean?'

She bowed her head a moment in assent. She was determined he should seize her meaning fully.

'A wave of spiritual awakening⁠—a descent of spiritual life upon a nation,' she answered slowly, 'forms itself a church, and the body of true believers are its sphere of action. They are literally its bodily expression. Each individual believer is a corpuscle in that Body. The Power has provided itself with a vehicle of manifestation. Otherwise we could not know it. And the more real the belief of each individual, the more perfect the expression of the spiritual life behind them all. A Group-soul walks the earth. Moreover, a nation naturally devout could attract a type of soul unknown to a nation that denies all faith. Faith brings back the gods.⁠⁠… But today belief is dead, and Deity has left the world.'

She talked on and on, developing this main idea that in days of older faiths there were deific types of life upon the earth, evoked by worship and beneficial to humanity. They had long ago withdrawn because the worship which brought them down had died the death. The world had grown pettier. These vast centres of Spiritual Power found no 'Body' in which they now could express themselves or manifest.⁠ ⁠… Her thoughts and phrases poured over him like sand. It was always sand he felt⁠—burying the Present and uncovering the Past.⁠⁠…

He tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever he looked Sand stared him in the face. Outside these trivial walls the Desert lay listening. It lay waiting too. Vance himself had dropped out