Then somebody else would bring up the way he had been taken by that queer little rent in the veil of common experience--the sudden rush of certainty that something which is happening now has all happened before, or that some place, when first we see it, has really been known to us of old and is only being revisited now, not discovered. You know how you seem, when that sudden light comes, to escape for a while from your common thoughts about time, as if out of a prison in which you have been shut up so long that you had almost forgotten what it is to be free: it flashes into your mind that immortality, for all you know, may exist within one moment; that life, for all you know, may draw out into state after state, and that all that you are conscious of at common times might be merely a drop or two lipping over the edge of the full vessel of some vast consciousness animating the whole world. Another man would bring into the common stock a recollection of the kind of poignant portrait dream that sometimes comes: not a dream of any incident, but only the face of a friend, more living than life, with all the secret kindness and loneliness of his mind suddenly visible in the face, so that you think of him as you think of your mother when she is dead and the stabbing insight of remorse begins. Thus would these inexpert people hang unconsciously about the uncrossed threshold of religion. With minds which had recovered in some degree the penetrative simplicity of a child's, they disinterred this or that unidentified bone of the buried God from under the monumental piles of débris which the learned, the cunning, and the proud, priests and kings, churches and chapels, had heaped up over the ideas of perfect love, of faith that would leave all to follow that love, and of the faithful spirit's release from mean fears of extinction. In talk they could bring each other up to the point of feeling that little rifts had opened here and there in the screens which are hung round the life of man on the earth, and that they had peeped through into some large outer world that was strange only because they were used to a small and dim one. They were prepared and expectant. If any official religion could ever refine the gold out of all that rich alluvial drift of "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things," now was its time. No figure of speech, among all these that I have mixed, can give the measure of the greatness of that opportunity. V