comprises the Father and Holy Ghost.  The contending forces to my hero will be incarnated by Pontius Pilatus, the Roman governor, and Judas of Kerioth, a very dangerous and powerful Hebrew politician—­a man of very liberal ideas, one who believed in the supremacy of the West.  What a glorious play it will make!  I have named it The Third Kingdom, Hyzlo.  What a glorious idea it is, Hyzlo—­the greatest drama the world has ever witnessed!”

III

THE DOVE

“The greatest drama the world has ever witnessed” ... mumbled his disciple....  The sun still shone on the cold stone flagging, and upon the wall facing him hung the crucifix.  But the motes no longer danced merrily in the light.  Evening was setting in apace, and Hyzlo, accepting one dream as equal in veracity with the other, crossed to the embrasure and, his elbows on the sill, watched the sun—­looking like a sulphur-coloured cymbal—­sink behind the sky-line.  He was still in the same attitude when the blue of the heavens—­ah! but not that gorgeous, hard Alexandrian blue—­melted into peacock and cool saffron hues.  He mused aloud:—­

“By the very nature of his mental organs man can never grasp reality.  It is always the sensation, never the real thing, he feels.  The metaphysicians are right.  We can never know the actual world outside of ourselves.  We are imprisoned in a dream cage; the globe itself is a cage of echoes.  Science, instead of contradicting religion, has but affirmed its truths.  Matter is radiant energy—­matter is electric phenomenon.  The germ-plasma from which we stem—­the red clay of Genesis—­is eternal.  The individual is sacrificed to the species.  The species never dies.  And how beautifully logical is the order of our ancestry as demonstrated by the science of embryology.  Fish, batrachians, reptiles, mammals; in which latter are included the marsupials as well as lemurs, primates, Man.  And after what struggles Man assumed an erect position and looked into the eyes of his mate!  After Man?  Nietzsche preaches that man is a link between the primate and Superman; Superman—­the angels!  But intelligence in man may be an accident caused by over-nutrition, the brain developing from rich phosphors.  If this were so—­how would fall to earth our house of pride!  Are we so close to the animal?  But Quinton proves that after man in the zooelogical series comes the bird.  Birds—­half reptiles, half angels.  Angels!  Do evolution and revelation meet here on common ground?  Or was Joachim, the Abbot of Flores, inspired when he wrote of the Third Kingdom, that Kingdom in which the empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spirit; that Third Kingdom in which the twin-natured shall reign, as Ibsen declares; the Messiah—­neither Emperor nor Redeemer, but the Emperor-God.  The slime shall become sap and the sap become spirit!  From gorilla to God!  Man in the coming Third Kingdom may say:  “I,