logical subjects: it seemed to me that the only worthy interest in life was the beautiful; and, in my Olympian narrowness of sympathy, people who worried themselves about other questions seemed to me poor, morbid, medieval wretches. You see, I led a life of great solitude, and great though narrow happiness, shut up among books, and reading only such of them as favoured my perfect serenity of mind. But little by little I got to know other men, and to know somewhat more of the world; then things began gradually to change. I began to perceive the frightful dissonances in the world, the horrible false notes, the abominable harmonies of good and evil; and to meet all this I had only this kind of negative materialism, which could not suffice to give me peace of mind, but which entirely precluded my accepting any kind of theory of spiritual compensation and ultimate justice; I grew uneasy, and then unhappy. Just at that moment it so happened that I lost a friend of mine to whom I was considerably attached, whose life had been quite singularly unfortunate, indeed appeared to be growing a little happier only a few months before his death. It was the first time that death came

near me, and close before my eyes. It gave me a frightful moral shock, not so much perhaps the loss of that particular individual to myself as the sense of the complete extinction of his personality, gone like the snuffed-out flame or the spent foam of the sea, gone completely, nowhere, leaving no trace, occupying no other place, become the past, the past for which we can do nothing."

Rheinhardt had put down his book for a moment, and listened, with a puzzled and wondering look. That people should be haunted by thoughts like these seemed to him almost as incomprehensible as that the dead should arise and join in a ghastly dance round the gravestones; nor would this latter phenomenon have seemed to him much the more disgusting of the two; so, after a minute, he settled down again and pulled out of his pocket a volume of Aristophanes.

"You have felt all this, Baldwin," said Vere, "and you would nevertheless deliberately inflict such pain upon others? You have felt all the misery of disbelief in a future life, and you are surprised that I should be unwilling to meddle with the belief of my wife and children ?"

"I am surprised at your not being almost involuntarily forced into communicating what you know to be the truth; surprised that, in your mind, there should not be an imperious sense that truth must out. Moreover, I think that the responsibility of holding back truth is always greater than any man can calculate, or any man, could he know the full consequences thereof, could support. We have been speaking of the moral discomfort attendant upon a disbelief in a future life; a moral discomfort, which, say what we may, is nowadays only momentary, does not outlive our first grief at death, for we moderns have not a very vital belief in a future state. Well, we ought also to

think of what was the state of things when such a belief thoroughly existed, when what you call the phantasmagoria of love was a reality; -bring up to your memory the way in which the mystics of the Middle Ages, and, indeed, the mystics of all times, have spoken of life—as a journey during which the soul must neither plough nor sow, but walk on, its eyes fixed upon heaven, despising the earth which it left barren and bitter as when it came. "Servate tanquam peregrinum et hospitem super terram, ad quem nihil spectat de mundi negotiis," that is what the Imitation bids us do. Ask yourself which is the more conducive to men making the world endurable to others and themselves, to men weighing their wishes and thoughts, and bridling their desires, and putting out all their strength for good,—the notion that there is a place beyond the grave where all is perfect, where all sloth and unkindness, and repented folly and selfishness may be expiated and retrieved; or the notion that whatever excellence there can be, man must make with his own hands, that whatever good may be done, whatever may be felt, repaired, atoned for, must be done, felt, repaired, and atoned for in this world. Even were I logically convinced of the existence of a future life, I should be bound to admit the enervating effect thereof on our sense of responsibility and power of action. I should regret the terrible moral tonic of the knowledge that whatever of good I may do must be done at once, whatever of evil I have done, be effaced at once also. But let this be, and answer me, Vere, do you believe that a single individual has a right to hide from others that which he believes to be the truth? Do you seriously consider that a man is doing right in destroying, for the sake of the supposed happiness of his children, the spark of truth which happens to be in his power, and which belongs neither to him nor to his children, but to the whole world? Can you assert that it is honest on your part, in order to save your children the pain of knowing that they will not meet you, or their mother, or their dead friends again in heaven, to refuse to give them that truth for which your ancestors have paid with their blood and their liberty, and which your children are bound to hand on to their children, in order that this little spark of truth may grow into a fire which shall warm and light the whole world?"

"There is something more at stake than the mere happiness or unhappiness of my children," answered Vere, "at all events than such happiness as they might get from belief in an after life. There is the happiness, the safety of their conscience."

"Do you think you can save their conscience by sacrificing your own ?"

"I should not be sacrificing my conscience were I doing that which I felt bound to do, Baldwin. Would you have me teach my children that this world, which they regard as the kingdom of a just and loving God, whose supremest desire is the innocence and happiness

of His creatures, is in reality the battlefield or the playground of physical forces, without thought or conscience; nay, much worse, is the creation either of a principle of good perpetually allying itself to a principle of evil, or of a dreadful unity which permits and furthers good and evil alike? What would you think of me were I to tell my children that all that they had learned of God and Christ is falsehood; and that the true gods of the world are the serenely heartless, the foully bloodthirsty gods of early Greece, of Phoenicia, and Asia Minor? You would certainly think me a bad father. Yet this old mythology represents with marvellous accuracy the purely scientific view of the world, the impression given by the mere contemplation of Nature, with its conflicting and caballing divinities, good and bad, black and white, resisting and assisting one another, beneficent and wicked, pure and filthy by turns. The chaos, the confusion, the utter irresponsibility, which struck the framers of old myths, is still there. All these stories seem to us very foolish and very horrible: an omniscient, omnipotent Zeus, threatened by a mysterious, impersonal Fate, looming dimly behind him; a Helios who ripens the crops and ripens the pestilence; a Cybele for ever begetting and suckling and mutilating; we laugh at all this. But with what do we replace it? And if we look at our prosaic modern nature, as is shown us by science, can we accuse the chaotic and vicious fancy of those early explainers of it? Do we not see in this nature bounty and cruelty greater than that of any early gods, combats more blind than any Titan's battles, marriages of good and evil more hideous than any incests of the old divinities, monster births of excellence and baseness more foul than any Centaur or Minotaur; and do we not see the great gods of the universe sitting and eating the flesh of men, not unconsciously, but consciously, serenely, and without rebuke ?"

"That's a curious observation of yours," put in Rheinhardt; "bat it would appear as if there had here been a difference between the two generations; that with the Semitic the feeling of right and wrong, of what ought or ought not to be in the abstract, entirely overshadows mere direct perception, scientific perception of Nature, and considerable phenomena, not with respect to their necessity, but with reference to their ethical propriety; while, as you remark, the Aryan

""

race

But Rheinhardt's generalizations were altogether wasted upon his two friends.

"Such is Nature," pursued Vere, with impetuosity; " and in it yon scientific minds bid us to seek for moral peace and moral safety. How can we aspire, as to the ideal of moral goodness, to that which produces evil ineffable, inevitable evil? How measure our moral selves against this standard; how blush before this unblushing god? How dare we look for consolation where our moral sense, if

enlightened, must force us to detest and to despise? Where, then, shall we seek the law, the rule by which to govern our lives? And the horror of horrors lies in this-that we are forced to conceive as evil all that which is at variance with the decrees of Nature, of this same Nature which is for ever committing evil greater than any of us could commit,-herein, that we cannot rebel. As long as Nature meant the Devil, it might be opposed; but we know that for us there can be no good save in obeying Nature-obeying that which is not good in itself; it has, as if with intentional malice, forced us to bend, to walk in its ways; if we refuse solidarity with it, we are sucked into a worse evil still. The sight of individual misfortune can never bring home this horrible anomaly as does a study of the way in which whole peoples have been sacrificed first to sin, then to expiation; of the manner in which every rebellion against this evilpolluted nature, every attempt of man to separate himself, to live by a rule of purity of his own, has been turned into a source of new abominations. Am I to show all this to my children, and say to them: Only Nature is good; and Nature is the evillest thing that we can conceive, since it forces to do evil and then punishes. Would a belief in Ashtaroth or Moloch not be as moral as this one ?"

Baldwin waited till Vere had come to an end.

"I can quite understand all that you feel, because I have felt it myself," he said, unshaken by his friend's vehemence. "I was telling you of the terrible depression which gradually came over me as I perceived what the world really was; and which, for a couple of years at least, made me live in constant moral anguish, especially after the death of that friend of mine had, as I told you, brought home to me how the disbelief in a future life took away the last possibility of believing in a just and merciful Providence. I revolved in my mind every possible scheme for conciliating the evil inherent in the world with our desire for good. Christianity, Buddhism, Positivism, they all assumed to quiet our conscience with the same hollow lie; Positivism saying that the time would come when Nature and good would be synonymous; Christianity reminding us that man may have but a moment wherein to become righteous, while God has all eternity; always the same answer, the evil permitted or planned in the past is to be compensated by the good in the future, agony suffered is to be repaid in happiness, either to the worn-out, broken soul in another world, or to the old, worn-out humanity in this. Such answers made me but the more wretched by their obvious futility: How efface the indelible? can God himself undo the accomplished, cancel that which has been committed and suffered? Can the God of religion, with His after-death, Paradise joys, efface the reality of the agonies endured upon earth? Can the inconceivable of Positivism efface with the happiness of the men of the twentieth century the misery of the men of the nineteenth ? Can good cause evil in the

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same individual,-the warmth and honour of the old man cancel the starvation and cold and despair of the youth? Can evil suffered be blotted out, and evil committed be erased? Forgiven perhaps; but effaced, taken from out of the register of the things that have been, never. This plea of the future, whether in this world or another, what is it, but a half-hour which the mercy of man gives to his God wherein to repent and amend and reprieve; a half-hour of centuries indeed, but a half-hour none the less in eternity, and to expiate the evil done in a lifetime of infinitude ?"

"What is the use of going on like that?" asked Rheinhardt; "why cannot you two be satisfied with the infinite wickedness of mankind, without adding thereunto the wickedness of Nature? As Wolfram von Eschenbach remarked already six centuries ago,—

"

Ihr nöthigt Gott nichts ab durch Zorn '-try and reform man, but leave God alone. But in truth all such talk is a mere kind of rhetorical exercise, brought into fashion by Schopenhauer, who would have been horrified at the waste of time and words for which he is responsible."

"We shall certainly not make Nature repent and reform by falling foul of her," answered Vere; "but at all events, by protesting against evil, however inevitable, we shall prevent ourselves being degraded into passive acceptance of it."

"I was going to say," went on Baldwin, "that I went through all these phases of moral wretchedness. And while they lasted, the temptation to have done with them, to free myself by a kind of intellectual suicide, was constantly pursuing me; it seemed as if every person I spoke with, every book that I opened, kept repeating to me,' Disbelieve in your reason, and believe in your heart; that which may be impossible to your logic, may yet be possible to God's goodness.' It seemed to me as if I would give everything to be permitted to lay down my evil convictions, to shut my intellectual eyes, to fall into spiritual sleep, to dream-to be permitted to dream those beautiful dreams which consoled other men, and never again to wake up to the dreadful reality. But I saw that to do so would be mean and cowardly; I forced myself to keep awake in that spiritual cold, to see things plainly, and trudge quietly forward upon that bleak and hideous road. Instead of letting myself believe, I forced myself to doubt and examine all the more; I forced myself to study all the subjects which seemed as if they must make my certainty of evil only stronger and stronger. I instinctively hated science, because science had destroyed my belief in justice and mercy; I forced myself, for a while, to read only scientific books. Well, I was rewarded. Little by little it dawned upon me that all my misery had originated in a total misconception of the relative positions of Nature and of man; I began to perceive that the distinction between right and wrong conduct had arisen in the course of the evolution of mankind, that right