Page:The optimism of Butler's 'Analogy'.djvu/51

Rh those same fields we toil and moil, labouring to reduce our bewildering mass of experience to effective order and coherency—labouring to read the secret by which it may be handled with practical efficiency and security of purpose. It might, surely, be an immense relief to us, under the storm and stress of our tremendous task, to have by our side, a fellow worker who sets himself resolutely to our particular business: who is determined to accept every conceivable fact that experience can bring him: who faces all that man is called upon to face, however vast and appalling, however strange and unanticipated, however repellent and grim: and who still emerges confident and self-possessed, utterly convinced of the rightness that is at the root of things, and of the worth of man's conscience and of the validity of man's reason: sure of the light that he follows, of its sufficiency for life's purpose, of its adequacy for all future emergencies, of its power to expand under the gradual advance by which man moves ever onwards from level to level, from task to task, in answer to a voice that invites him to come up higher.

This man, so serious, so anxious, so open-eyed, so relentlessly candid, so deliberate, so reasonable, so real, so unflinchingly true to the facts as they actually are, yet issues out of his long wrestle in the night, possessed of a Vision which never fails him. It holds, for him, the entire Universe together in a coherent and progressive Purpose, stretching from the lowest point of physical existence, through all the grades of Natural Development, up to the highest order of the Spiritual Heaven disclosed to us through the open door of Revelation. One secret makes itself known everywhere: one mind is everywhere reiterating its tireless delight: one pressure sets everywhere towards one far-off event. And into this Vision man is, in his measure, admitted. He can already follow its traces; and according to the faithfulness and love, patience, and courage with which he pursues it amid the perplexities that encumber and beset