'And what was your misery all along? Was it not that you felt you ought to be a person with a one inner unity, a one practical will, purpose, and business given to you--not invented by yourself--in the great order and harmony of the universe,--and that you were not one?--That your self-willed fancies, and self-pleasing passions, had torn you in pieces, and left you inconsistent, dismembered, helpless, purposeless? That, in short, you were below your ideal, just in proportion as you were not a person?' 'God knows you speak truth!' 'Then must not that ideal of humanity be a person himself?--Else how can he be the ideal man? Where is your logic? An impersonal ideal of a personal species! . . . And what is the most special peculiarity of man? Is it not that he alone of creation is a son, with a Father to love and to obey? Then must not the ideal man be a son also? And last, but not least, is it not the very property of man that he is a spirit invested with flesh and blood? Then must not the ideal man have, once at least, taken on himself flesh and blood also? Else, how could he fulfil his own idea?' 'Yes . . . Yes . . . That thought, too, has glanced through my mind at moments, like a lightning-flash; till I have envied the old Greeks their faith in a human Zeus, son of Kronos--a human Phoibos, son of Zeus. But I could not rest in them. They are noble. But are they--are any--perfect ideals? The one thing I did, and do, and will believe, is the one which they do not fulfil--that man is meant to be the conqueror of the earth, matter, nature, decay, death itself, and to conquer them, as Bacon says, by obeying them.' 'Hold it fast;--but follow it out, and say boldly, the ideal of humanity must be one who has conquered nature--one who rules the universe--one who has vanquished death itself; and conquered them, as Bacon says, not by violating, but by submitting to them. Have you never heard of one who is said to have done this? How do you know that in this ideal which you have seen, you have not seen the Son--the perfect Man, who died and rose again, and sits for ever Healer, and Lord, and Ruler of the universe? . . . Stay--do not answer me. Have you not, besides, had dreams of an all-Father--from whom, in some mysterious way, all things and beings must derive their source, and that Son--if my theory be true--among the rest, and above all the rest?' 'Who has not? But what more dim or distant--more drearily, hopelessly notional, than that thought?' 'Only the thought that there is none. But the dreariness was only in your own inconsistency. If He be the Father of all, He must be the Father of persons--He Himself therefore a Person. He must be the Father of all in whom dwell personal qualities, power, wisdom, creative energy, love, justice, pity. Can He be their Father, unless all these very qualities are infinitely His? Does He now look so terrible to you?'