Page 183 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

gift on its appointed day, confident that it would descend
upon him, though it seemed strange to him at times that
wisdom and understanding and knowledge were so dis-
tinct in their nature that each should be prayed for apart
from the others. Yet he believed that at some future stage
of his spiritual progress this difficulty would be removed
when his sinful soul had been raised up from its weakness
and enlightened by the Third Person of the Most Blessed
Trinity. He believed this all the more, and with trepidation,
because of the divine gloom and silence wherein dwelt the
unseen Paraclete, Whose symbols were a dove and a mighty
wind, to sin against Whom was a sin beyond forgiveness,
the eternal mysterious secret Being to Whom, as God, the
priests offered up mass once a year, robed in the scarlet of
the tongues of fire.
The imagery through which the nature and kinship of
the Three Persons of the Trinity were darkly shadowed
forth in the books of devotion which he read—the Father
contemplating from all eternity as in a mirror His Divine
Perfections and thereby begetting eternally the Eternal Son
and the Holy Spirit proceeding out of Father and Son from
all eternity—were easier of acceptance by his mind by rea-
son of their august incomprehensibility than was the simple
fact that God had loved his soul from all eternity, for ages
before he had been born into the world, for ages before the
world itself had existed.
He had heard the names of the passions of love and hate
pronounced solemnly on the stage and in the pulpit, had
found them set forth solemnly in books and had wondered

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