Participating in the Great Adventure

IT was the day after I had received the sentence: I might live six months or six years. I was, I was told politely, like an old automobile tire that sometimes surprises its owner by outlasting a couple of good ones. On the other hand, the owner is sometimes less pleasantly surprised.

So I had learned the night before, and, the doctor having given his verdict, I had gone pretty soon to sleep; because, anyway, there was no use in worrying, and one had to sleep. But in the morning we sat over our breakfast coffee, my friend and I, and talked.

The day was as fair and the scene as beautiful as either the one or the other this side of Paradise. We were on a green lawn beneath the shade of a towering old mango, and breakfast was set before us on small tables. A few feet away and a few yards below, the calm, clear river, which but a few hundred yards higher up had been a rushing torrent emerging from the craggy valley behind the house, flowed gently to the sea. It was possibly fifty yards wide; then came a strip of sand and pebbles; and beyond that strip the mighty Pacific, whose waters, though they reached us from the Pole itself, were merely lapping on the sand. I remember now the cheery group of natives splashing their brown bodies in the shadows. I can see, and I hope I shall see forever, the play of sun and shadow on those green hills, up the coast, that fell sharply, in tropical luxuriance, to the sea.

We had been talking of trivialities — if they are trivialities. Flowers, and whether one could grow garden peas in the tropical islands. A bit of a silence had fallen; and then I broke it, returning without explanation to the question of that verdict.

‘It does not seem to matter much,’I said, ‘anyway; but, supposing one was to flick off, what do you suppose one would find?’

Christian Aalborg, the big Dane, whom the natives called Kiriti, smiled. He smiled that slow smile of his which I have learned to know. There is little Kiriti has not read and less upon which he has not thought. Besides, Kiriti’s thinking is worth while. He gets into his thinking something of the serenity of his lovely island, and even his words seem to escape the clangor of city folk.

’I don’t suppose,’ he said, ‘in that matter. I only hope.’

I reflected a little. Then I too smiled. ‘That is all right,’ I rejoined. ‘But I know you well enough to be sure that you, Kiriti, do not hope without foundation, whereas I think I am disposed to hope with none.’

‘“Hopes may be frail or fond,”’ he quoted with mock gravity.

Something in the remark aroused me. ‘That is precisely the point,’ I said. ‘The hopes of immortality one sees expressed in religious articles, or hears on the lips of popular preachers, appear to me to be remarkably frail and sickly fond. I am tired of them. I have been for some time. But under the present circumstances I should like to know yours.’

‘I am not good at lecturing and I cannot write,’ said Kiriti. ‘Suppose you repeat to me these same frailties and let me see if I can answer them.’

That was how it all began, and I should like to write our talk down before I see the end of the game from my seat in the grandstand.

At the time, I remember, I tossed away the end of my cigarette and took another.

‘The doctor said you were not to smoke too much,’ said Kiriti.

‘Confound the doctor,’said I, holding the match suspended. ‘However, the first orthodox argument is one I heard, for instance, eloquently expressed by a doctor the other day — seeing that we are talking of doctors. It runs much as follows. It is as old as the hills, of course, but here goes. In and before the dawn of history, natural man knew that death was not the end of life. He never thought otherwise. He took his immortality for granted. If a chief died, his wives and slaves were killed to bear him company in the other world. The orthodox make a lot of that. Belief in survival is the natural instinct, they say, belonging to the age of man’s childhood, when he was not so far from the Kingdom of God. It is only when —'

Kiriti interrupted. ‘I know. It is an old argument. The intelligence of the savage, who attributed a “tummyache ” to the Devil and often propitiated him with human sacrifices, is nevertheless to be our guide in the matter of God. The faith that believed some stone to be a deity who could kill is to assure us in our hope that death does not. Not too little but too much knowledge has proved to be a dangerous thing! But unfortunately even this argument, in the first place, is not true. Quite definitely and simply it is a lie invented to sustain an argument. The savages we know do not always believe in survival, or believe it only of certain persons, or regard it as only conditional or temporary. I have known a savage who mourned his father with strict obedience to rules, the breaking of which was said to trouble the spirit, for three weeks, only to indulge thereafter in conduct the exact opposite. I expostulated. “Father finish now,” he said, grinning all over his black face. And the savages we do not know, the real savages of the dawn of human life on earth, we do not know, and that is the end of it, despite all that our friends guess to the contrary.’

‘Can’t we infer things?’ I questioned. ‘Stonehenge, for example?’

‘Stonehenge? At least savages did not build Stonehenge. Whatever people did do so were far on the road to sophistication, but no one knows, as a matter of fact, who built it or when or how; and, even if it and such monuments express primitive man’s faith in survival, they are also connected with sun-worship and human sacrifices. And that brings me to my second point, that this argument, if true, would prove too much. History does not tell us of any savage yet, believing in the survival of the human spirit, who did not believe also in the survival of the spirits of cattle and dogs, food and drink, spears and stone clubs! If the natural man was so much wiser than we, who are we to limit his intuition? If he was right in supposing by intuition that the soul survives, how dare we say he was wrong in supposing, equally by intuition, that a thoroughly good club, if burned at the funeral of a chief, would prove an excellent weapon for him when he came to knock on the gate of Heaven? And perhaps still more, if his spiritual intelligence was so fine, how came it that his moral intelligence was so weak? Why take his faith and refuse his conscience? The one, we are told, soared to belief in God and the immortality of the soul, but the other, we know for certain, stooped to murder, polygamy, incest, and rape.’

Before he had finished I was getting out another match, for honestly, even I know enough of savages to be aware that Kiriti was right. But I lit my cigarette, forgetful of the doctors. However poor, one plank had gone. So I thought a while, and then said: ‘Very well, let us leave ancient faith; let us come to modern knowledge. We know that the very body does not perish. Nothing material that we know perishes. If we accept it as true that nothing of us that is material can be annihilated, is it then not foolish to suppose that the one thing about us which does perish should be the animating principle, the life, the soul, call it what you will?’ I even got pretty excited at this point, and, as my foolish habit is, jumped to my feet.

‘Why—’ I began.

‘Sit down!’ said Kiriti shortly. ‘That’s another thing they said you were not to do. And don’t talk rubbish. The body does perish, utterly. You have just eaten an excellent dish of bacon and eggs, and, if the boy had brought in some blackened cinders and a nasty smell, would you as cheerfully have eaten your breakfast maintaining that bacon and eggs had not been destroyed? A number of elements, in a strange and mysterious combination, make up what we call the body, the hand we love to touch, the lips we crave to kiss. At death they are released. The elements of what was the body do exist somewhere, but unless they are reassembled the body we know is destroyed forever. There is no reason in the whole of observed science to suppose that on the other side of death the combination is ever renewed. Actually, the kind of immortality that we know the body possesses is enough to destroy hope in immortality itself. Practically, my parts furnish new bodies for trees and flowers; but thought out the thing is simply horrible. The particles of my body have actually been the particles of someone else’s body. Or of worse. If there is any analogy to be drawn from the continuance of the elements that made up the body as to the survival of the soul, it would be that that survival is in a form so unlike what we knew as to be unrecognizable and indescribable. Swinburne is right enough:—

‘That’s all right as far as it goes,’ I said. ‘I admit it. But surely there is more in the argument. Some control — the soul, the ego, what you will — inhabits the body to use it as an instrument. Surely pure Materialism is defunct. It is not the brain that thinks. If, therefore, the brain dies, whatever it was that used the brain as a thinking instrument is, so far as we know, left untouched. In all probability it is provided with some higher instrument on which to play.’

‘Humph,’ said Kiriti.

‘You don’t think much of that?’ I queried.

‘It’s the sort of probability that rather bores me,’ he said. ‘A great musician, let us say, has some slight accident which deranges part of his brain matter. Your deduction would be that he is still a great musician, though he is now a certified lunatic? Your argument is that the essential ego is not changed, eh?’

‘That’s about it,’ I said.

‘And if he had been born, by a mischance,’ persisted Kiriti, ‘with an injured brain, then no one would know that he was a musician?’

‘I suppose so,’ I assented. ‘I don’t see that that affects the argument as a whole. Our physical being changes every so many years, yet we are well aware that we are the same individual. The ego of my university days is my ego now, however much wiser — and sadder! So it looks as if something which sat behind my brain did the controlling, and not the brain itself.’

‘What is the brain?’ asked Kiriti suddenly, as if he were off on a new line of thought.

I stared at him. Then I laughed. ‘You mean ultimately?’ I queried.

He nodded.

‘Well,’ I said meditatively, ‘I suppose, as with all natural things, it can be reduced to particles of negative or positive electricity.’

‘And what is a particle of electricity?’ demanded Kiriti.

I laughed again. ‘ Of course you have me there,’ I said. ‘I suppose you want me to say that nobody knows.’

‘Oh no, I don’t,’ said Kiriti. ‘Or at least not particularly. Electricity is at least energy.’

‘I suppose it is,’ I said. ‘What about it?’

‘Well,’ said Kiriti, ‘consider rationally the whole affair, begin with your musician. You admit that with a disordered brain there can cease to be any sign of his musical ability, and that if he were born with a disordered brain no one would know him to be a musician. Vet your logic demands the belief that his is the mute soul of an inspired musician. It is thus a reductio ad absurdum which gives away the whole show. On that argument the soul of a cannibal may be a very Plato. The last criminal lunatic we electrocuted may be another Christ. Or, in other words, all human standards may be nonsense, and your friend the savage may be justified indeed in supposing some devils to be loose. You must, also, compensate this musician, who has not given and cannot give any sign of his being a musician, by creating for him, by sheer guesswork, an etherial instrument in an etherial world. And that is precisely what orthodoxy does believe and do, constituting a theology of great moral difficulty and practical absurdity.’

‘But how get out of the dilemma?’ I persisted. ‘For it is a dilemma.’

‘Well,’ said Kiriti, ‘I suggested an avenue of escape when I asked you the composition, so far as we know it, of the brain. Can you argue that it is this assumed soul of the theologians that is engaged in driving negative particles of electricity around a positive core in your brain? But if it is not, then the energy which does the driving may well be the energy which produces the musician, and in that case all we know of that energy is that it is apparently impersonal, part of a greater whole, and diffused or transmuted after death into other substances. In a word, dust should go back to dust and energy to energy.’

I sat silent a minute, watching three tropic birds descend the valley and plane to the sea.

‘The nuisance is, Kiriti,’ I said, ‘that your scientific explanations are harder than the religious ones. The material is more difficult to believe than the spiritual.’

‘Just exactly so,’ said Kiriti, ‘and we are beginning to come to what I have called my hope. It has always been the obvious and the so-called spiritual that have been wrong. It was obvious to primitive man that, when his friend was killed by lightning, some devil had done it on purpose. All his priests said so, too. It was obvious to the ancient world that the sun, illumining and sustaining the whole of life, was a god. All the mystics said so, too. It was obvious to the mediæval world, and plainly supported by Scripture, that the earth was flat. The spiritual Church was prepared to burn the materialist who said otherwise, and saints to preach at the spectacle. It was obvious to Protestant reformers that this earth, the scene of divine interference and revelation, was the centre of the universe, and everything on it predestined. Calvin put Servetus to death for denying that very thing. Up to quite lately, up to Einstein even, it has seemed obvious that matter is not spirit, “that there must have been a beginning,” and so on. Why, the poor atheists and materialists (though I hate the words) are still proscribed under the blasphemy laws — in England, anyway — if they preach the contrary! And yet the materialists are proving right again. However seemingly paradoxical to say that that stone is in motion with boundless energy, we know it to be true, and it is equally true to say there never was a beginning.’

‘Explain that last,’ I said.

‘Well, human thought has always had to take refuge in some eternal. Somebody must have started the first hen on the egg-laying process that resulted in our hens, we said, so we said that God made the first hen. The obvious retort there, the retort of all children is, “Who made God, Mummy?” That question is just as rational in reality as “ Who made the first hen? ” or “Who made the first nebula?” Theologians of all ages answered for us by asserting that God was eternal, and since God was a mysterious entity, neither seen nor heard, nor figured in the advanced religions, the statement stood. It was, and is, of course, simply a phrase. Empty words. You can think of anything being eternal only if that thing is incomprehensible — which is exactly what the Christian creed was forced by the Greek intellects to say of God: “The Father eternal, the Son eternal, the Holy Ghost eternal; the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the Holy Ghost incomprehensible.”

‘Now Science has at last found something that is eternal. Radioactivity not only exhausts itself so slowly as to be practically inexhaustible, but in certain processes of apparent change and loss it actually regains and even increases its energy. We just know that the basic stuff of matter is, so far as language is of any use in such metaphysics, eternal. So far as knowledge goes, we know that the whole creation has evolved out of demonstrably eternal energy, and simultaneously Einstein helps us to understand how that might be by showing that time itself is relative. Time is a result of a condition. It is not itself a condition. What with one thing and another, the necessity for God has disappeared.’

We both sat silent for a while.

‘You see,’ said Kiriti gently, ‘what an absurd ass the first man must have seemed who said that the earth was in motion about a stationary sun! We have forgotten that only by a miracle have our brains been drilled to accept a later theory. And I think that our brains will yet be drilled into a wider hope and a more glorious faith than that of your friends the savages.’

I contemplated my friend while my thoughts raced. I wish I could give you an idea of Kiriti. There was never anyone less theatrical, more reasonable, more possessed of what the Greeks — or the Bible, for the matter of that — called ‘wisdom.’ I think he is the only true philosopher I have ever met — the sort of man who would quite simply and unemotionally rearrange his thoughts from top to bottom if he were faced with some new fact. Moreover, he is the kind of man who would follow his thought wherever it led him, irrespective of consequences. There is something of the Eastern mystic about Kiriti, but not the Chestertonian type of Eastern mystic. He is neither the emaciated wild-eyed saint of the Gothic churches nor the closed-eyed meditative Buddha. He is more like some bronze sailor who stands on the prow of his ship, with steady eyes that have looked on great spaces, and discerns port. But if that vision proved to be a mirage, Kiriti, undaunted, would still sail on.

I took up his last words. ‘Has the necessity for God wholly disappeared?’ I queried. ‘If He has disappeared as an answer to our question, “Who began it?" does He not remain as an answer to the question, “ Who designed it?”'

‘You do not say “designs”?' quizzed Kiriti.

I smiled. ‘What is the difference?’ I said.

‘Oh, I only wondered if you were among the sentimentalists who supposed, not only that God arranged the cosmic law of rain, but also that, if petitioned, he would design to make It rain at a given time and place.’

‘Not quite that,’ I said. ‘But surely the universe is designed?’

I thought Kiriti’s face grew a shade more grave.

‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the kind of argument that Bishop Butler used to prove design is as inefficient to-day as the cannon of the eighteenth century.’

‘Explain,’ said I.

It was unusual for Kiriti to be sarcastic, but he was sarcastic now.

"‘What divine Providence!” cried a hungry lion as he discovered the fat baby which an African mother had allowed to stray from her hut. “How marvelously is the universe designed!” cried a typhus bacillus, as he lighted upon a healthy young man with a wife and three children dependent upon him. And — a thing about which I cannot joke, however — is it Providence that designs the laws of hereditary cancer, venereal disease, and insanity?’

'“The hand then of the Potter shook”?’ I quoted interrogatively.

‘No,’ said Kiriti, even bitterly, ‘that is precisely what it does not do. Would God it did! The hand never shakes. The old Persian was neither daring nor blasphemous; he was only foolish. Law is immutable. It is designed, if it be designed, for the wellbeing of the typhus bacillus, as much as for that of the best of the human species. Even so awful a phenomenon as cretinism is a law. When a child born to healthy God-fearing parents is nevertheless damned from its birth to grow into a bestial condition that does not bear thinking, it is only because a thyroid gland has not been able to develop. No, what we see is a perfectly incredible and conflicting muddle of inevitable laws. The law of the lightning will kill you, however much you pray, if you stand on an ironstone hill; the law of the lightning conductor will save you, if you erect one scientifically. Two plants develop side by side; one is deadly poison, and the other its antidote. Law is forever clashing chaotically with law. And all religions have recognized this.’

‘What!’ I exclaimed.

‘I said that all religions had recognized this, for they have all tried to explain it away. As it was necessary to postulate God, the Designer, so it was necessary to explain the credible fantasy of the actual design by the introduction of some nasty person who had muddled it up. Everything harmful and destructive to man had to be put down to his interference. Hence every religion has its Satan, and the early Christian theologians were hard put to it even to explain Satan. They have had to invent wild tales of his origin, to give him a reign of a thousand years, to provide him at the end with a bottomless pit. They have, of course, failed to convince us moderns, but the point I want to make is this: the modern thought which rejects the Satan idea as rubbish cannot escape the dilemma which Satan was invented to meet.’

I thought for a while, and the more I thought the less I could see an answer. Then I had a bright idea. ‘How about the stars?' I asked. ‘Surely they move in regular courses.'

‘No better example,’replied Kiriti. ‘The stars looked orderly to man until the invention of the modern science of astronomy; until, too, we became aware that man has not been long enough on this planet even to perceive the motion on the whole of the stellar universe. Nevertheless, astronomy is aware that worlds dash into worlds every day like automobiles in the streets of modern cities; that streams of stars are whirling in every direction with the giddiest motion conceivable; that our own tiny solar universe is flying through stellar space, whence and whither no one knows. And even in the solar system every meteor is an example of disorder.’

‘All that is rather appalling,’ I said.

‘Is it?’ retorted Kiriti. ‘I don’t think so. In a universe of conflicting laws so incomprehensible that in one mood one is inclined to attribute them to a brainless fool and in another to a devil, there is one busy designer at work. There is someone regulating the headlong, crazy traffic at least in his own street, tidying and cleaning up his own back yard. He has indeed succeeded so far that chance observers, seeing the result of his work, are actually inclined to forget that the original property was in a horrid mess!'

‘Whom do you mean?' I asked.

Kiriti remarked quietly and very gravely: ‘Man.

‘Yes, man,’he said. ‘Let’s go back to your original savages, before any record, before man was even barbaric. Do you realize what a designless universe he lived in? His life was one perpetual fear, one dim, almost immemorial struggle for existence. He was like a baby left alone in a room with a fire burning in the grate, with razors lying about and dozens of dangerous machines, which looked fascinating to play with if he would. He had to fight for his life, not only with wild beasts stronger and better-armed than he, but with drought and flood, with hail and tempest, with unseen and undreamed-of microbes, ignorances, superstitions, and the dreadful wisdom of his own wise men. If you go back early enough, to a world that had not done with chaotic disturbances on a world-wide plane, he had to fight glacial ages, drying oceans, flooding continents. The very fact that he was man added to his worries, for the laws that ruled his embryo imaginations peopled the heavens with terrors and warred with his own advancement exteriorly and interiorly. Thus in the world about him, and in his own mind, he had to fight his way among a thousand gigantic forces striking one at another and at him. When he emerged into the state of the savage as we first know him, he had already inherited a legacy of inhibitions. I myself knew in East Africa a tribe which had more than two hundred classified and pictured devils. Each devil owed its origin to some law or another which primitive man had noted and had been able to explain only by personification.

‘ Out of that chaos man has not only partially climbed, but he has even created something of a cosmos. He has indeed created enough of a cosmos for good people to talk about Design. He has subdued all of the big beasts and many of the microscopic. He has learned the way to counteract, even sometimes to abolish altogether, the elemental disturbances that used to kill his crops. He has brought it about that great plagues are rare and that he is surprised when he is ill. He has taken elemental powers — such as electricity, from which he used to fly in terror — and bound them to his will. He has conquered laws, such as that of gravitation, to fly in the air and under the sea. He has diverted rivers, divided continents, spanned mountains, almost conquered time. He sees further into space and deeper into matter than his ancestors conceived the very gods could do. He has even begun to get to grips with his most dangerous foe— himself. Human imagination, mentality, psychology, is at least a territory in which he has planted his flag. Yes, if there is a designer in the universe, it is man!'

‘There is a real sense, then,’I asked quietly, ‘in which man is God?’

‘God?’ queried Kiriti. ‘I would rather not talk of God. It would appear as if God wished to remain veiled, and maybe there is something impious in attempting to raise that veil. The wisest of the old faiths said so in as many words, although their followers forgot the ancient wisdom and insisted on picturing him. Do you remember Mr. Gissing? “Somehow he felt that to account for a world of unutterable strangeness they had invented a God far too cheaply simple.” Even our knowledge of that is a vast step forward. The ultimate reality is not yet. I think we should rather foster a working religion.’

‘Is there one?’ I demanded.

Kiriti smiled. ‘ If one has faith, hope, and charity, even the Fundamentalists would admit that one has a religion, I suppose,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I queried, ‘what is your faith, Kiriti?’

Kiriti stared thoughtfully out at sea, where the sunlight was dancing on the water and where the mountains of a distant island lay so lovely on the horizon that they seemed not of this world.

‘My faith,’he said, ‘the solid rock beneath my feet, is in the beauty of things, and, as it were, in the unity of that beauty. Have you ever realized that it is only educated man who sees beauty? Your savage does not stop to admire a sunset. Even the barbaric tribes of to-day have, many of them, no name for flowers or even for color other than colors that relate to food. Even when they make beautiful things they see no beauty in them. African tribes that used to make lovely pottery think empty kerosene-cans far more lovely. Most decorative work on the part of savages is the result of boredom, or of ceremonial magic. It mainly achieves the grotesque. No, realization of the beauty of the world is a slowly dawning revelation which the highest among us feel most. And not only the beauty of the physical earth, but the beauty of thought, the beauty of love, the beauty of communion of mind with mind, all belong to civilized man.

‘It was this realization which made man first articulate. Once articulate, the tiny span of historic life on earth began. If you represent the life of the globe by one hour, then only for two seconds, proportionately, has man seen beauty! It would be difficult in those two seconds to detect advance, but I think we can. Not only the rare artist and philosopher, but educated men generally are beginning to hate ugliness, and our much more universal love of beauty is becoming detached from the old superstitions that sometimes aided and sometimes impeded its spirit. Faintly and dimly, but surely, we are beginning to want beauty for beauty’s sake, and in that beauty I have faith in the face of death. Personal survival, beyond the dissolution of the grave, of individuals as we knew them presents one with so many more difficulties than it eliminates, and is so plainly a relic of savage and mediæval thinking, that I hold with it scarcely at all. Only this I believe: that, as there is beauty here, there is beauty beyond; as there is love here, there is love beyond; as there is fellowship here, there is fellowship beyond — beyond time perhaps; in some state in which neither time nor place belongs; in some way certainly beyond our limited range of thought; in some relationship that transcends our idea of personal relationship on earth as our idea of Heaven would transcend that in the mind of a dog; but somehow, sometime, somewhere. And I do share in that, here and now,’ said Kiriti.

‘ It is so great a wealth, that in which we share,’ he went on dreamily. ‘Take one aspect of it. The old faith was so harshly exclusive, but the new — Why, I love Jesus again, as when I was a little boy. I love the great-hearted martyrs, whether Catholic or Protestant. I love rugged old Mohammed, and the emptiness of Saint Sophia. I love the gentle Buddha, and all the wise, simple, quiet Eastern saints. And I love even the impulsive sinners that the old ways did not allow us to love. I think I even love modern scientists! We share a place together in the great adventure.’

In the shallows of the river a fat baby was splashing. Her mother ran and picked her out, laughing and kissing her. Kiriti watched the simple little incident with a smile, and I watched him. Then he said: — ‘I believe, too, that what we call Evolution is a first guess at what will prove to be a truth more splendid than that of the first chapter of Genesis, or the teachings of Buddha. It is to me, as it were, a first childish attempt to name a great universal movement in all nature. Every fresh discovery or hope links in with it and deepens it. It is not the physical side of it that matters so much as the spiritual. It is of small moment that man is a cousin, many times removed, of the gorilla, but it is a very big thing that his perception of beauty, his Teachings toward the infinite, have evolved from the first consciousness of mere being to the thought of a Tolstoy or an Edison. Moreover, as it has widened, so it has become humble. Not only am I one flesh with beasts and flowers and rocks, and glad of it, but in so far as I can understand spirit I am of the same spirit, too. My energy, my composition, though more highly evolved, are theirs. I do not think Saint Paul knew what he was talking about, but in his own times and in his own way he guessed at a truth. “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together,” and the goal of the great procession is what man in the days of his ignorance called God.

‘More. We see it all as long-drawnout and painful and irregular. It is my faith that it is no one of these three things, but what I have called an adventure, with a sure end, in which we are participating now. Death does not matter, nor what we call time, nor pain, nor apparent defeat — that is my faith,’ said Kiriti.

‘And the second of the trinity that poor Saint Paul enumerated?’ I questioned, smiling. ‘Incidentally, he was again right in declaring they three abide forever!’

‘He was,’ laughed Kiriti, ‘and hope is the practical side of my religion, which should buoy us up in our dark moments. My hope is that even in our own time and day, even with my own success and folly, I can do something to move things along. I confidently hope that one day disease and poverty and hate will be banished by man’s own effort on this earth, and that one day we shall jettison, universally and without heartbreaking, what is still left of the old religious bogies. We shall cease to muddle what is essentially pure with what is dogmatically or legally or socially labeled pure. We shall be honest, not only in the sense that we shall not steal, but in the sense that we shall put an honest value on work and on production. We shall have got rid of false values; and, without every one of us becoming a Diogenes and living in a tub, we shall have seen the truth of that old story. Lastly, I honestly hope that we shall stop talking rubbish about what we do not know; that we shall stop guessing, and making ourselves and other people miserable with our guesses; that we shall banish fear, bred of ignorance, which has been master of the world so long. Then we shall begin to know something definite about something. Ultimately the old crazy, rickety ladders will be all tumbled down, and on a ladder of truth we shall climb to Heaven. It is of no earthly importance,’ said Kiriti, ‘but I guess when we get there — ‘ He broke off abruptly.

‘Yes?’ I queried.

‘Well, that’s guessing,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve just said we have got to stop guessing.’

And he got to his feet as if he had finished.

‘Here! Hold on a minute,’ said I. ‘You have forgotten the charity part.’

Kiriti regarded me in silence. Then he said, rather stumblingly, ‘That’s the practical side of religion toward other people, and it’s not for me to preach it.’

And as I looked up at Kiriti and thought about him; as I remembered one or two things that I knew of Kiriti in the past; as I told myself that if Kiriti could take upon himself my sentence, or any other greater sentence, he was just the sort of man who would do it unhesitatingly, I am not ashamed to say — perhaps as I was so soon to take my leave — that a mist gathered in my eyes. For ‘greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’