“I thought I had passed out of this.  When I returned to London, and began this new life, the burden seemed all at once lifted from me.  I could look here and there with freedom; the sky was bright above me; human existence was cheerful and noble and justified in itself.  I began to learn a thousand things.  Above all, my mind fixed on Art; in that I thought I had found a support that would never fail me.

“Oh, why could it not last?  The clouds began to darken over me again.  I heard voices once which I had hoped were for ever silenced.  That sense of sin and horror came upon me last night in the streets.  I suffered dreadfully.”

She was silent, and, meeting Waymark’s eyes so fixed on her own, became conscious of the eagerness and fervour with which she had spoken.

“Have you any experience of such things?” she asked nervously.  “Did you ever suffer in the same way?”

“It is all very strange,” he said, without answering her question.  “This overpowering consciousness of sin is an anachronism in our time.  But, from the way in which you express yourself, I should have thought you had been studying Schopenhauer.  I suppose you know nothing of him?”

“Nothing.”

“Some of your phrases were precisely his.  Your doctrine is simply Pessimism, with an element of dogmatic faith added.  With Schopenhauer, the will to live is the root of sin; mortify this, deny the first instincts of your being, and you approach righteousness.  Buddhism has the same system.  And, in deducing all this from the plain teachings of Christianity, I am disposed to think you are right and consistent.  Christianity is pessimism, so far as this world is concerned; we see that in such things as the thanksgiving for a’ person’s death in the burial service, and the prayer that the end of the world may soon come.”

He paused, and thought for a moment.

“But all this,” he resumed, rising from his seat, and going to stand with one arm upon the mantelpiece, “is of course, with me, mere matter of speculation.  There are two allegories, which define Pessimism and Optimism.  First that of Adam and Christ.  Adam falls through eating of the tree of knowledge; in other words, sin only comes with self-consciousness, sin is the conscious enjoyment of life.  And, according to this creed, it can only be overcome by abnegation, by the denial of the will to live.  Accordingly, Christ enters the world, and, representing Humanity, as Adam had done, saves the world by denial, of Himself, even to death.  The other allegory is that of Prometheus.  He also represents mankind, and his stealing of the fire means man’s acquirement of a conscious soul, whereby he makes himself capable of sin.  The gods put him in bondage and torment, representing the subjection to the flesh.  But Prometheus is saved in a different way from Adam; not by renunciation, but by the prowess of Hercules, that is to say, the triumphant aspiration