“Are you sure?” asked Peter.

“I am,” said Arnold.  “It’s not in the Westminster Confession, nor in the Book of Common Prayer, nor, for all I know, in the Penny Catechism, but I believe it.  God Almighty must be stronger than the devil, Graham.”

Peter considered this.  Then he shook his head.  “That won’t wash, Arnold,” he said.  “If God is stronger than the devil, so that the devil is never ultimately going to succeed, I can see no use in letting him have his fling at all.  And I’ve more respect for the devil than to think he’d take it.  It’s childish to suppose the existence of two such forces at a perpetual game of cheat.  Either there is no devil and there is no hell—­in which case I reckon that there is no heaven either, for a heaven would not be a heaven if it were not attained, and there would be no true attainment if there were no possibility of failure—­or else there are all three.  And if there are all three, the devil wins out, sometimes, in the end.”

“Then, God is not almighty?”

Peter shrugged his shoulders.  “If I breed white mice, I don’t lessen my potential power if I choose to let some loose in the garden to see if the cat will get them.  Besides, in the end I could annihilate the cat if I wanted to.”

“You can’t think of God so,” cried Arnold sharply.

“Can’t I?” demanded Peter.  “Well, maybe not, Arnold; I don’t know that I can think of Him at all.  But I can face the facts of life, and if I’m not a coward, I shan’t run away from them.  That’s what I’ve been doing these days, and that’s what I do not think even a man like yourself does fairly.  You think, I take it, that a girl like that is damned utterly by all the canons of theology, and then, forced on by pity and tenderness, you cry out against them all that she is God’s making and He will not throw her away.  Is that it?”

Arnold slightly evaded an answer.  “How can you save her, Graham?” he asked.

“I can’t.  I don’t pretend I can.  I’ve nothing to say or do.  I see only one flicker of hope, and that lies in the fact that she doesn’t understand what love is.  No shadow of the truth has ever come her way.  If now, by any chance, she could see for one instant—­in fact, mind you—­the face of God....  If God is Love,” he added.  They walked a dozen paces.  “And even then she might refuse,” he said.

“Whose fault would that be?” demanded the older man.

Peter answered quickly, “Whose fault?  Why, all our faults—­yours and mine, and the fault of men like Pennell and Donovan, as well as her own, too, as like as not.  We’ve all helped build up the scheme of things as they are, and we are all responsible.  We curse the Germans for making this damned war, and it is the war that has done most to make that girl; but they didn’t make it.  No Kaiser made it, and no Nietzsche.  The only person who had no hand in it that I know of was Jesus Christ.”

“And those who have left all and followed Him,” said Arnold softly.