“Any one would....”

“But it’s your teachers and catechisms have set you against God....  They want to make out He owns all Nature.  And all sorts of silly claims.  Like the heralds in the Middle Ages who insisted that Christ was certainly a great gentleman entitled to bear arms.  But God is within Nature and necessity.  Necessity is a thing beyond God—­beyond good and ill, beyond space and time, a mystery everlastingly impenetrable.  God is nearer than that.  Necessity is the uttermost thing, but God is the innermost thing.  Closer He is than breathing and nearer than hands and feet.  He is the Other Thing than this world.  Greater than Nature or Necessity, for he is a spirit and they are blind, but not controlling them....  Not yet....”

“They always told me He was the maker of Heaven and Earth.”

“That’s the Jew God the Christians took over.  It’s a Quack God, a Panacea.  It’s not my God.”

Letty considered these strange ideas.

“I never thought of Him like that,” she said at last.  “It makes it all seem different.”

“Nor did I. But I do now....  I have suddenly found it and seen it plain.  I see it so plain that I am amazed that I have not always seen it....  It is, you see, so easy to understand that there is a God, and how complex and wonderful and brotherly He is, when one thinks of those dear boys who by the thousand, by the hundred thousand, have laid down their lives....  Ay, and there were German boys too who did the same....  The cruelties, the injustice, the brute aggression—­they saw it differently.  They laid down their lives—­they laid down their lives....  Those dear lives, those lives of hope and sunshine....

“Don’t you see that it must be like that, Letty?  Don’t you see that it must be like that?”

“No,” she said, “I’ve seen things differently from that.”

“But it’s so plain to me,” said Mr. Britling.  “If there was nothing else in all the world but our kindness for each other, or the love that made you weep in this kind October sunshine, or the love I bear Hugh—­if there was nothing else at all—­if everything else was cruelty and mockery and filthiness and bitterness, it would still be certain that there was a God of love and righteousness.  If there were no signs of God in all the world but the godliness we have seen in those two boys of ours; if we had no other light but the love we have between us....

“You don’t mind if I talk like this?” said Mr. Britling.  “It’s all I can think of now—­this God, this God who struggles, who was in Hugh and Teddy, clear and plain, and how He must become the ruler of the world....”

“This God who struggles,” she repeated.  “I have never thought of Him like that.”

“Of course He must be like that,” said Mr. Britling.  “How can God be a Person; how can He be anything that matters to man, unless He is limited and defined and—­human like ourselves....  With things outside Him and beyond Him.”