“Neither me nor any one else who has outgrown his childhood, I should think.  I have never been able to understand the outcry of the orthodox over their lost miracles.  It makes their position neither better nor worse.  The miracles could never prove their creeds.  How am I to recognise a divine messenger?  He makes the furniture float about the room; he changes that coal into gold; he projects himself or his image here when he is a thousand miles away.  Why, an emissary from the devil might do as much!  It only proves—­always supposing he really does these things instead of merely appearing to do so—­it proves that he is better acquainted with natural laws than I am.  What if he could kill me by an effort of the will?  What if he could bring me to life again?  It is always the same; he might still be morally my inferior; he might be a false prophet after all.”

He took out his watch and looked at it, by this simple action illustrating and reminding me of the difference between us—­he talking to pass away the time, I thinking aloud the gnawing question at my heart.

“And you have no hope for anything beyond this?”

Something in my voice must have struck his ear, trained like every other organ of observation to quick and fine perception, for he looked at me more attentively, and it was in a gentler tone that he said—­

“Surely, you do not mean for a life beyond this?  One’s best hope must be that the whole miserable business ends with death.”

“Have you found life so wretched?”

“I am not speaking from my own particular point of view.  I am singularly, exceptionally, fortunate, I am healthy; I have tastes which I can gratify, work which I keenly enjoy.  Whether the tastes are worth gratifying or the work worth doing I cannot say.  At least they act as an anodyne to self-consciousness; they help me to forget the farce in which I play my part.  Like Solomon, and all who have had the best of life, I call it vanity.  What do you suppose it is to those—­by far the largest number, remember—­who have had the worst of it?  To them it is not vanity, it is misery.”

“But they suffer under the invariable laws you speak of—­laws working towards deliverance and happiness in the future.”

“The future?  Yes, I know that form of consolation which seems to satisfy so many.  To me it seems a hollow one.  I have never yet been able to understand how any amount of ecstasy enjoyed by B a million years hence can make up for the torture A is suffering to-day.  I suppose, dealing so much with individuals as I do, I am inclined to individualise like a woman.  I think of units rather than of the mass.  At this moment I have before me a patient now left suffering pain as acute as any the rack ever inflicted.  How does it affect his case that centuries later such pain may be unknown?”

“Of course, the individual’s one and only hope is a future existence.  Then it may be all made up to him.”