the moment say this; that if he was God, as the critic put it, it seems possible that he knew the next discovery in science, as well as the last, not to mention (what is more common in rationalistic culture) the last but three.  And what will be the next discovery in psychological science nobody can imagine; and we can only say that if it reveals demons and their name is Legion, we can hardly be much surprised now.  But at any rate the days are over of Omniscience like that of the Hibbert critic, who knows exactly what he would know if he were God Almighty.  What is pain?  What is evil?  What did they mean by devils?  What do we mean by madness?  The rising generation, when asked by a venerable Victorian critic and catechist, “What does God know?” will hardly think it unreasonably flippant to answer, “God knows.”

There was something already suggested about the steep scenery through which I went as I thought about these things; a sense of silent catastrophe and fundamental cleavage in the deep division of the cliffs and crags.  They were all the more profoundly moving, because my sense of them was almost as subconscious as the subconsciousness about which I was reflecting.  I had fallen again into the old habit of forgetting where I was going, and seeing things with one eye off, in a blind abstraction.  I awoke from a sort of trance of absentmindedness in a landscape that might well awaken anybody.  It might awaken a man sleeping; but he would think he was still in a nightmare.  It might wake the dead, but they would probably think they were in hell.  Halfway down the slope the hills had taken on a certain pallor which had about it something primitive, as if the colours were not yet created.  There was only a kind of cold and wan blue in the level skies which contrasted with wild sky-line.  Perhaps we are accustomed to the contrary condition of the clouds moving and mutable and the hills solid and serene; but anyhow there seemed something of the making of a new world about the quiet of the skies and the cold convulsion of the landscape.  But if it was between chaos and creation, it was creation by God or at least by the gods, something with an aim in its anarchy.  It was very different in the final stage of the descent, where my mind woke up from its meditations.  One can only say that the whole landscape was like a leper.  It was of a wasting white and silver and grey, with mere dots of decadent vegetation like the green spots of a plague.  In shape it not only rose into horns and crests like waves or clouds, but I believe it actually alters like waves or clouds, visibly but with a loathsome slowness.  The swamp is alive.  And I found again a certain advantage in forgetfulness; for I saw all this incredible country before I even remembered its name, or the ancient tradition about its nature.  Then even the green plague-spots failed, and everything seemed to fall away into a universal blank under the staring sun, as I came, in the great spaces of the circle of a lifeless sea, into the silence of Sodom and Gomorrah.