Instead of lending themselves to a solution, they spawned a multitude of problems. They could not fecundate the personal will, from which they issued. For it is the Law that from personal will, alone when it is rendered fertile by its own disaster (like a rotted seed) can cosmic will and a cosmic synthesis arise. The legend of Christ was deeper: deeper the blundering way of Quixote. For he sought the grace of union not by absorbing the world into himself, but by transmuting himself into an impersonal symbol of the world. He failed; but his book lives; for with the failure is the triumphant impulse that led up to it. The effect of the crusade was death; the cause was life. The magics of Don Quixote are as absurd as our own. But his impulse was as true as the Prophets’. The Old and the New Testaments also are a tale of sins and follies. But these are visible, because the light of God shines on them. In the effect that passes, all the prophets and all the Christs have failed. None of them has failed, in the cause that remains. The cause of Don Quixote’s life strikes us as truer than the realities which brought about his death. This is the pitiful best that we can say for him--or for any of the prophets. One and all, they encountered _reasons_ which put their _truth_ to flight. And the world was able to live whole within their truth only in ages which willfully made reason servile. In the violence of his divorce from the world which he aspired to unite, in the ridiculousness of his discord from it, Don Quixote stands the last prophet of our historic Order. He bespeaks our need: a dynamic understanding which shall enlist ideal and reason, thought and act, knowledge and experience; which shall preserve the personal within the mystical will; which shall unite the world of fact in which we suffer all together, with the world of dream in which we are alone.... _CHAPTER X_ _THE WILL OF GOD_ _a. The Bull Fight_ _b. Man and Woman_ _c. Madrid_ _a. The Bull Fight_