right to challenge the sophistries of Germany. They had not needed the war to teach them the reality of evil; and if they had sinned, they had never for a moment tried to prove that they did right in sinning.

Peter knew all this, though he would not have said it in so many words. In his book, he was trying to meet the main onset of all those destructive forces. He had realized that the modern world had no faith, since the creeds had gone into the melting pot; and he was trying to write down, plainly, for plain men, exactly what he believed.

He turned over the red-lined pages of the big leather-bound ledger, half diary, half commonplace book, in which, for the last forty years, he had made his notes. It was a queer medley, beginning with passages written in his youth, that recalled many of his old struggles. There was one, in particular, that always reminded him of a school friend named Herbert Potts, who had eventually won the coveted scholarship. They used to go for walks together, over the hills, and talk about science and religion.

"So you don't believe there is any future life," Peter had said to him one day.

"Not for the individual," replied Herbert Potts, adjusting his glasses, with a singularly intellectual expression.

"But if there is none for the individual, it means the end of all we are fighting for, because the race will come to an end, eventually," said Peter. "Why, think, Potts, think, it means that all your progress drops over a precipice at last. It means that instead of the Figure of Love, we must substitute the Figure of Death, stretching out his arms and saying to the whole human race, 'Come unto Me! Suffer little children to come unto Me!'"

"I am afraid all the evidence points that way," said Potts, and as he had just passed the London matriculation examination, the words rang like a death-knell in Peter's foolish heart. He remembered how the words had recurred to him in his dreams that night, and how he awoke in the gray dawn to find that his pillow was wet with tears.

There were many other memories in his book, memories of the long struggle, the wrestling with the angel, and at last the music of that loftier certainty which he longed to impart.

A little after midnight, he threw aside the hopeless chaos of the manuscript, into which he had been trying to distil the essence of his scrap-book. He rose and went upstairs to his bedroom on the next floor. It was a little smaller than his sitting-room, and contained a camp-bed, a wash-stand, with a cracked blue jug and basin, and a chest of drawers. Over the head of the bed was a photogravure reproduction of The Light of the World; and on the wall, facing it, an illuminated prayer: Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord! Under this, affixed to the wall, was the telephone which connected the Hatchets' with the Naval Station on the coast, by an under-sea wire.

But in spite of this modern invention, Peter Ramsay had quietly gone back through the centuries. He looked as if he were talking to a very great distance indeed, a distance so great that it became an immediate presence. (Do not mathematicians declare that if you could throw a stone into infinity, it would return to your hand?) He was kneeling down by the bed, clasping his hands, lifting his face, closing his eyes, and moving his lips, exactly like a child at his prayers.

It is an odd fact, and doubtless it would have fortified the great ironic intellects of our day (though seventy feet in this unfathomable universe may hardly be reckoned as depth) to know that in the darkness of the reef outside, seventy feet below, four shadowy figures had just landed from a collapsible boat, belonging to the U-99. Three of them were now hauling it out of reach of the waves. The fourth was Captain Bernstein. He stood, fingering his revolver, and looking up at the two lighted windows.

Concerning these things, Peter received no enlightenment; but he rose from his knees with a glowing countenance, and hurried down to his work again.

"I'll begin at the beginning," he muttered.

He took a clean sheet of paper and headed it: Chapter I. Under this, he wrote the first four words of the Bible: "In the beginning, God." Then he crossed them out, and wrote again: "First Principles," as a better means of approach to the moderns.

He consulted his ledger, and decided that a certain paragraph, written long ago, must take the first place in his book. He wrote it down just as it stood.

"We have forgotten the first principles of straight thinking—the axioms. We have forgotten that the whole is greater than the part. Hence comes much fallacy among modern writers, even great ones, like that pessimist who has said that man, the creature, possesses more nobility than that from which he came.

"One thing must be acknowledged as known, even by agnostics,—namely, that if we have experienced here on earth the grandeurs of the soul of Beethoven and Shakespeare, there must be at the heart of things, before ever this earth was born, something infinitely greater. It is infinitely greater because it is the Producer—not the Product.

"There are some who say that this is only putting the mystery back a stage. This is not a true statement. The mystery is that there should be anything in existence at all. The moment you have a grain of sand in existence, the impossible has happened, and the miracle of the things that we see around us can only be referred to some primal miracle, greater than all, because it contained all their possibilities within itself.

"Beyond this, we are all agnostics. But our reason, building on what we see around us, carries us thus far. Modern thinkers have reversed this process. They begin with man as the summit, and explain him by something less. This again they explain by something less; and slowly whittle away all the visible universe till they arrive at the smallest possible residuum. There is no more tragic spectacle in this age than that of the philosophers who, like Herbert Spencer, having reduced the whole universe to a nebula, try to bridge the gulf between this nebula and nothingness. The great intellect of Spencer grovels below the mental capacity of a child of ten as he makes this absurd attempt, announcing that perhaps the primal nebula might be conceived as thinning itself out until nothingness were reached. It is the agnostics who evade the issue. For there are certain things here and now which we must accept. We know that Love and Thought are greater than the dust to which we consign them. There is only one choice before us. Either there is nothing behind these things, or else there is everything behind them. If we say that there is nothing behind them, all our human struggle goes for nothing. We abandon even the axioms of our reason, and we are doubly traitors to the divine light that lives in every man. If we say that there is everything behind the universe, each of us has his own private door into that divine reality, the door of his own heart."

At this moment three of the shadowy figures on the reef below were ensconcing themselves behind a boulder of rock, close to the base of the tower, and the fourth figure was groping about on the reef, collecting a handful of stones.

"I have heard men say," Peter continued, "that they cannot believe in a God who would permit all the suffering on this earth, or else he must be a limited God who cannot help himself.

"This is another question involving the freedom of the will. How long would a world hold together if we could all depend on a miracle to help us at every turn, or even to save the innocent from the consequences of our guilt? Those who ask the question usually assume that our sufferings here are the end of all. The fact that the opposite assumption accords better with our sense of justice is surely no reason for denying it, especially when it follows from the answer given in the first paragraph. These men, asking for miraculous proof of omnipotence, to save the