The book slipped from his hands.  “Why not?” he murmured, “why not?  There is no such thing as chance.  The law of probabilities is not a mere fancy, but an austere need.  Matter is ever in evolution.  Energy alone is indestructible.  Radium has revealed this to us.  In eternity when the Infinite throws the dice, double-sixes are sure to come up more than once.  Miracles?  But why miraculous?  Infinity of necessity must repeat itself, and then I, sitting here now, will sit here again, sit and doubt the goodness of God, ay, doubt His existence....  How horrible!” He paused in the whirl of his thoughts.

“Yet how beautiful, for if the eternal recurrence be truth, then must the great drama of the Redemption be repeated.  Then will our foes be convinced of Christianity and its reality.  But shall we be conscious in that far-off time of our anterior existence?  Ah! hideous, coiling doubt.  What a demon is this Nietzsche to set whirring in the brains of poor, suffering humanity such torturing questions!  Better, far better for the world to live and not to think.  Thought is a disease, a morbid secretion of the brain-cells.  Ah! materialist that I am, I can no longer think without remembering the ideas of Cabanis, that gross atheist.  Why am I punished so?  What crimes have I committed in a previous existence—­Karma, again!—­that I must perforce study the writings of impious men?  Yet I submitted myself as a candidate for the task, to save my brethren in Christ from soiling their hearts.  Heaven preserve me from the blight of spiritual pride, but I believe that I am now a scapegoat for the offences of my fellow-monks, and, thus, may redeem my own wretched soul.  Ah!  Nietzsche—­Antichrist.”

He arose and threw the volume across his cell.  Then going to the window regarded with humid gaze the world that sprawled below him in the voluptuous sunshine.  But so sternly was the inner eye fixed on the things of the spirit that he soon turned away from the delectable picture, and as he did so his glance rested upon a crucifix.  He started, his perturbed imagination again touched.

“What if Nietzsche were right?  The first Christian, the only Christian, died on the cross, he has said.  What an arraignment of our precious faith, Jesus Christ, our Lord God!  What sweet names are Thine!  How could Nietzsche not feel the music of that Hebrew-Greek combination?  Perhaps he did; perhaps he masked a profound love behind his hatred.  Jesus our Lord!  Hebrew-Greek.  But why Greek?  Why ...?” Another pause in this sequestered chamber where the buzzing of an insect could assume a thunderous roar.  “The eternal return.  Why should Christ return?  Must the earth be saved again and again and a billion times again?  Awful thought of a God descending to a horrible death to cleanse the nameless myriads from sins which they seek ever as flies treacle.  More ghastly still is the thought that the atheist Scandinavian put into the mouth of his Julian the Apostate: