And was it
only the resultant general sense of such familiarity, diffused through
his memory, that in a while suggested the question whether there had not
been--besides Flavian, besides Cornelius even, and amid the solitude
which in spite of ardent friendship he had perhaps loved best of all
things--some other companion, an unfailing companion, ever at his side
throughout; doubling his pleasure in the roses by the way, patient of
his peevishness or depression, sympathetic above all with his grateful
recognition, onward from his earliest days, of the fact that he was
there at all? Must not the whole world around have faded away for him
altogether, had he been left for one moment really alone in it?" One can
see in this sense of constant companionship the untranslated and indeed
the unexamined Christian doctrine of God. And, because this God is
responsive to all the many-sided human experience which reveals Him, it
will be an actual preparation not for Theism only, but for that
complexity in unity known as the Christian Trinity. Nothing could better
summarise this whole achievement in religion than Pater's apt sentence,
"To have apprehended the _Great Ideal_, so palpably that it defined
personal gratitude and the sense of a friendly hand laid upon him amid
the shadows of the world.
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