CHAPTER XVI. The natural step to knowledge is through faith. Even human science teaches as much as this. The faith of the scholar in the theoretic value of his facts precedes his intelligent use of them. Invention dreams before it does. Discovery believes before it finds. Creation imagines before it achieves. Spiritual intelligence, when it came at last, to me, came with something of the jar of all abnormal processes. The wholesome movements of trust I had omitted from my soul's economy. The function of faith was a disused thing in me. Truth had to treat me as an undeveloped mind. In the depth of my consciousness, I knew that, come what might, I had for ever lost the chance to be a symmetrical healthy human creature, whose spiritual faculties are exercised like his brain or muscle; who has lived upon the earth, and loved it, and gathered its wealth and sweetness and love of living into his being, as visible food whereby to create invisible stature; whose earthly experience has carried him on, as Nature carries growth--unconsciously, powerfully, perfectly, into a diviner life. For ever it must remain with me that I had missed the natural step. If I say that the realization of knowledge was the first thing to teach me the value of faith, I shall be understood by those who may have read this narrative with any sort of sympathy to the present point; and, for the rest, some wiser, better man than I must write. I do not address those who follow these pages as I myself should once have done. I do not hope to make myself intelligible to you, as I would to God I could! Personal misery is intelligible, and the shock of belated discovery. But the experience of another in matters of this kind has not a "scientific" character. No one can know better than I how my story will be dismissed as something which is not "a fact." In the times to be, it is my belief that there shall yet arise a soul, worthier of the sacred task than I to which shall be given the perilous and precious commission of interpreter between the visible life and the life invisible. On this soul high privilege will be bestowed, and awful opportunity. Through it the deaf shall hear, the dumb shall speak. The bereaved shall bless it, and the faint of heart shall lean on it, and those who know not God shall listen to it, and the power of God shall be upon it. But mine is not that soul. Even as One who was above man did elect to experience the earthly lot of man to save him; so one who is a man among men may yet be permitted to use the heavenly lot in such wise as to comfort them. The first mission called for superhuman power. The second may need only human purity.