From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd can be replaced in a man’s imagination, how far some substitute for that social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing fear.  He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.  His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes.  We can no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain.  It is deep in our inheritance.  As deep as hunger.  And just as we have to satisfy hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the unconquerable importunity of fear.  We have to reassure our faltering instincts.  There must be something to take the place of lair and familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with us into the lonely places.  For it is true that man has now not only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order. . . .

Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, “This brings me to God.”

“The devil it does!” said White, roused to a keener attention.

“By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as we feel indeed alone.  An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place.  There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow.  There can be no courage beyond social courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in us the sense of God.  But God is a word that covers a multitude of meanings.  When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I defied God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions and pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd’s will in canonicals, I do still deny him and repudiate him.  That God I heard of first from my nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the nursemaids of mankind.  But there is another God than that God of obedience, God the immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from home and country, God scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a nail-pierced body out of death and came not to bring peace but a sword.”

With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of Benham’s spirit.  They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when he died.

 (Surely the man was not a Christian!)

“You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you cannot suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain because you have identified your life with the honour of mankind and the insatiable adventurousness of man’s imagination, so that the possible death is negligible and the possible achievement altogether outweighs it.” . . .