DIANA OF THE INLET
as the morning star—a man who had leapt into the arena of thought, and stood as it were on a dais, an orator with the flush of youth on his high brows. His had been an enthusiastic war of words. His argument dredged modern science of the essences of superstition, and yet he used the spiritual hypothesis, the ancient faith, with the reverential simplicity that early association had imbued. The beautiful myth was a halo bound round the brows of his dead mother. The patriarchs of Learning, the magi of knowledge, with incredulity and amaze paid him homage. Wonderment gave place to admiration and applause. The laurels of scholarship were pressed upon him. For awhile the gate to an immortal fame was ajar. “A youthful daring spirit of invention, stimulated by the discoveries of science to take its flight to new and hitherto inaccessible regions,” had been written of him. A recluse, Michael Greig immured himself from the world, that wolfish hunger after knowledge quenching all impulses but one to push beyond. His soul struggled in the solitude of a lonely life, thought its wings moved in the serene atmosphere of pure philosophy. Lost in a maze of speculations, in lofty abstractions, his brain grew dizzy. “The consciousness of the limitations of man, that sense of an open Secret—which he cannot penetrate—in which is the essence of religion,” probed his faculties, dragging them earthwards. He was impressed with the futility of toiling thought—the inscrutability of the Infinite to the Finite. In a chaos of thought, frenzied with doubt and despair, he cried to the world—that lay with ears a-gape to hear him, “I know nothing—nothing!” 253