For these are the foundations of a fallen world, and a sea below the seas on which men sail.  Seas move like clouds and fishes float like birds above the level of the sunken land.  And it is here that tradition has laid the tragedy of the mighty perversion of the imagination of man; the monstrous birth and death of abominable things.  I say such things in no mood of spiritual pride; such things are hideous not because they are distant but because they are near to us; in all our brains, certainly in mine, were buried things as bad as any buried under that bitter sea, and if He did not come to do battle with them, even in the darkness of the brain of man, I know not why He came.  Certainly it was not only to talk about flowers or to talk about Socialism.  The more truly we can see life as a fairy-tale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the Dragon who is wasting fairyland.  I will not enter on the theology behind the symbol; but I am sure it was of this that all the symbols were symbolic.  I remember distinguished men among the liberal theologians, who found it more difficult to believe in one devil than in many.  They admitted in the New Testament an attestation to evil spirits, but not to a general enemy of mankind.  As some are said to want the drama of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark, they would have the drama of Hell without the Prince of Darkness.  I say nothing of these things, save that the language of the Gospel seems to me to go much more singly to a single issue.  The voice that is heard there has such authority as speaks to an army; and the highest note of it is victory rather than peace.  When the apostles were first sent forth with their faces to the four corners of the earth, and turned again to acclaim their master, he did not say in that hour of triumph, “All are aspects of one harmonious whole” or “The universe evolves through progress to perfection” or “All things find their end in Nirvana” or “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”  He looked up and said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.”

Then I looked up and saw in the long jagged lines of road and rock and cleft something of the swiftness of such a thunderbolt.  What I saw seemed not so much a scene as an act; as when abruptly Michael barred the passage of the Lord of Pride.  Below me all the empire of evil was splashed and scattered upon the plain, like a wine-cup shattered into a star.  Sodom lay like Satan, flat upon the floor of the world.  And far away and aloft, faint with height and distance, small but still visible, stood up the spire of the Ascension like the sword of the Archangel, lifted in salute after a stroke.

CHAPTER X

THE ENDLESS EMPIRE