Shadows of Ecstasy by Charles Williams

manhood’s aflame with love you will burn down with it the barriers that separate us from immortality. You waste yourselves, all of you, looking outwards; you give yourselves to the world. But the business of man is to assume the world into himself. He shall draw strength from everything that he may govern everything. But can you do this by doubting and dividing and contemplating? by intellect and official science? It is greater labour than you need.”
    â€œGovern?” Sir Bernard put in. “What do you mean by governing the world? Ruling it, like Cæsar?”
    â€œCæsar,” Considine answered, “knew of it. I am sure he did. This man who had so many lovers, who could bear all hardships and use all comfort, who was not athlete or lover or general or statesman or writer, but only those because he was Cæsar, who founded not a dynasty but a civilization, whose children we are, who dreamed of travelling to the sources of the Nile and sailed out to the strange island whither the Gallic boatmen rowed the souls of the dead, who was lord of all minds and natures, didn’t he dream of the sources of other waters and set sail living for a land where the spirits of other men are but helplessly driven? Rule the world? He was the world; he mastered it; the power that is in it burned in him and he knew it, he was one with it.”
    â€œCæsar died,” Sir Bernard said.
    â€œHe was killed, he was destroyed, but he was not beaten and he did not die,” Considine answered. “Why does a man die but because he had not driven strength into the imagination of himself as living?”
    Sir Bernard put his hand in the pocket of his dinner jacket, but he paused before withdrawing it, as the subdued but powerful voice swept on. “Cæsar had the secret then, and if Antony had had it too Europe might have been a place of lordlier knowledge to-day. For he could have destroyed Octavian and he and the Queen of Egypt in their love could have presented the capacities of love on a high stage before the nations. But they wasted themselves and each other on the lesser delights. And what failed at Alexandria was unknown in Judæa. Ah, if Christ had known love, what a rich and bounteous Church he could have founded! He almost conquered depth in his own way, but he was slain like Cæsar before he quite achieved. So Christianity has looked for the resurrection in another world, not here. The Middle Ages wondered at visions of the truth—alchemy, sorcery, fountains of youth, these are part of the dream. The Renascence knew the splendour but lost the meaning, and it was tempted by learning and scholarship, and ravaged by Calvin and Ignatius with their systems, and it withered into the eighteenth century. They did well to call that the Augustan age, for Cæsar had fallen and Christ was but a celestial consolation. But the time is come very near now.”
    Roger said, “But how? but how?”
    Considine answered, “By the transmutation of your energies, evoked by poetry or love or any manner of ecstasy, into the power of a greater ecstasy.”
    The photograph in Sir Bernard’s hand dropped on to the table; leaning forward, he said, his eyes bright with a great curiosity, “But do you tell us that you have done it?”
    â€œI have done one thing,” Considine said. “I think I shall do the other when I have made a place for it on earth. I live, except for accident, as I choose and as long as I choose. It is two hundred years since I was born, and how near am I to-night to any kind of natural death?”
    He did not exalt over them or seem to speak boastfully. He leaned back in his chair, and with an exalted certitude his eyes held them motionless, while his voice put to them that serene inquiry. Clear and triumphant, he smiled at them, and his gentlemen stood beside him, and his wine, hardly touched, glowed in its glass, as his own spirit seemed to glow in the purged and