'Mellot told me of him, and of you, too, six weeks ago. He is now gone to fetch him from Manchester. I cannot trust him here in England yet. The country made him sad; London has made him mad; Manchester may make him bad. It is too fearful a trial even for his faith. I must take him with us.' 'What interest in him--not to say what authority over him--have you?' 'The same which I have over you. You will come with me; so will he. It is my business, as my name signifies, to save the children alive whom European society leaves carelessly and ignorantly to die. And as for my power, I come,' said he, with a smile, 'from a country which sends no one on its errands without first thoroughly satisfying itself as to his power of fulfilling them.' 'If he goes, I go with you.' 'And he will go. And yet, think what you do. It is a fearful journey. They who travel it, even as they came naked out of their mother's womb--even as they return thither, and carry nothing with them of all which they have gotten in this life, so must those who travel to my land.' 'What? Tregarva? Is he, too, to give up all? I had thought that I saw in him a precious possession, one for which I would barter all my scholarship, my talents,--ay--my life itself.' 'A possession worth your life? What then?' 'Faith in an unseen God.' 'Ask him whether he would call that a possession--his own in any sense?' 'He would call it a revelation to him.' 'That is, a taking of the veil from something which was behind the veil already.' 'Yes.' 'And which may therefore just as really be behind the veil in other cases without its presence being suspected.' 'Certainly.' 'In what sense, now, is that a possession? Do you possess the sun because you see it? Did Herschel create Uranus by discovering it; or even increase, by an atom, its attraction on one particle of his own body?" 'Whither is all this tending?' 'Hither. Tregarva does not possess his Father and his Lord; he is possessed by them.' 'But he would say--and I should believe him--that he has seen and known them, not with his bodily eyes, but with his soul, heart, imagination--call it what you will. All I know is, that between him and me there is a great gulf fixed.' 'What! seen and known them utterly? comprehended them? Are they not infinite, incomprehensible? Can the less comprehend the greater?' 'He knows, at least, enough of them to make him what I am not.' 'That is, he knows something of them. And may not you know something of them also?--enough to make you what he is not?' Lancelot shook his head in silence. 'Suppose that you had met and spoken with your father, and loved him when you saw him, and yet were not aware of the relation in which you stood to him, still you would know him?' 'Not the most important thing of all--that he was my father.'