He was tired and excited, of course; he was intensely imaginative; but there are some experiences that a rise of temperature cannot explain and that an imagination cannot originate....
For it seemed to him that here he was aware of an immeasurable need to which those ministrations were addressed, and this whole was countless in its units and clamant in its silence.

It was as a man might see the wall of his room roll away, beyond which he had thought only the night to lie, and discern a thronging mass of faces crying for help, pressing upon him, urging, yet all without sound or word.

He attempts in his diary to use phrases for all this--he speaks of a pit in which is no water, of shadows and forms that writhe and plead, of a light of glass mingled with fire; and yet of an inevitability, of a Justice which there is no questioning and a Force that there is no resisting.

And, on the other side, there was this help given by men of flesh and blood like himself--using ceremonies and gestures and strange resonant words....
The whole was as some enormous orchestra--there was the wail on this side, the answer on that--the throb of beating hearts--there were climaxes, catastrophes, soft passages, and yet the result was one vast and harmonious whole.
It was the catafalque that seemed to him the veiled door to that other world that so manifested itself--seen as he saw it in the light of the yellow candles--it was as the awful portal of death itself; beneath that heavy mantle lay not so much a Body of Humanity still in death, as a Soul of Humanity alive beyond death, quick and yet motionless with pain.
And those figures that moved about it, with censor and aspersorium, were as angels for tenderness and dignity and undoubted power.

They were men like himself, yet they were far more; and they, too, one day, like himself, would pass beneath that pall and need the help of others that should follow them....
* * * * * Something of this is but a hint of what Frank experienced; it came and went, no doubt, in gusts, yet all through he seems to have felt that sense that here was a door into that great watching world beyond--that here, in what is supposed by the world to be the narrow constraint of religion, was a liberty and an outlook into realities such as the open road and nature can but seldom give.