Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/103

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ch. 7
AND THE WAY OF MARY
81

cessional; but that all was fixed. He saw the eternity in the moment.

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
. . . yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade . . .
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!

He sees the trees whose leaves will never fall, and the spring which is an eternal spring.

A joy of art and of the eyes is the poising of a moment thus, and the showing in a sculptured relief or a picture or a poem all that was happening in the moment—the eternal life that the moment holds, the moment which we think passes, but which in truth never passes but ever is. We move past the landscape of Time and deceive ourselves that it is Time which passes us. It is we who pass by Time. The Time we have passed through remains. We can keep it in our view. We must go high into the heaven to see All-Time—nearer to God, nearer to the central sun of glory.

It is to take cognisance of the infinite breadth of Time, a richer knowledge than that on which we pride ourselves, knowledge of the length of Time. There is nothing more touching that one man can say to another than the recounting of all that is happening at one and the same time in the Universe. But speech and writing have one great lack. It is that we must spend time to write and we must spend time to read. We must write one word after another, must read one word after another. But,