Page 184 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

why his soul was unable to harbour them for any time or to
force his lips to utter their names with conviction. A brief
anger had often invested him but he had never been able to
make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself pass-
ing out of it as if his very body were being divested with ease
of some outer skin or peel. He had felt a subtle, dark, and
murmurous presence penetrate his being and fire him with
a brief iniquitous lust: it, too, had slipped beyond his grasp
leaving his mind lucid and indifferent. This, it seemed, was
the only love and that the only hate his soul would har-
bour.
But he could no longer disbelieve in the reality of love,
since God Himself had loved his individual soul with divine
love from all eternity. Gradually, as his soul was enriched
with spiritual knowledge, he saw the whole world forming
one vast symmetrical expression of God’s power and love.
Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation
of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on
the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giv-
er. The world for all its solid substance and complexity no
longer existed for his soul save as a theorem of divine pow-
er and love and universality. So entire and unquestionable
was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted
to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in
any way necessary that he should continue to live. Yet that
was part of the divine purpose and he dared not question
its use, he above all others who had sinned so deeply and so
foully against the divine purpose. Meek and abased by this
consciousness of the one eternal omnipresent perfect real-

184 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man