But religion, Hodder saw, was trusting.  Not credulous, silly trusting, but thoughtful trusting, accepting such facts as were definitely known.  Faith was trusting.  And faith without works was dead simply because there could be no faith without works.  There was no such thing as belief that did not result in act.

A paragraph which made a profound impression on Hodder at that time occurs in James’s essay, “Is life worth living?”

“Now-what do I mean by I trusting?  Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world, and to authorize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? . .  Our faculties of belief were not given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by.  And to trust our religions demands men first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real.  It is a fact of human nature that man can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma and definition.”

Yet it was not these religious philosophies which had saved him, though the stimulus of their current had started his mind revolving like a motor.  Their function, he perceived now, was precisely to compel him to see what had saved him, to reenforce it with the intellect, with the reason, and enable him to save others.  The current set up,—­by a thousand suggestions of which he made notes,—­a personal construction, coordination, and he had the exhilaration of feeling, within him, a creative process all his own.  Behold a mystery ’a paradox’—­one of many.  As his strength grew greater day by day, as his vision grew clearer, he must exclaim with Paul:  “Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me!”

He, Hodder, was but an instrument transmitting power.  And yet—­oh paradox!—­the instrument continued to improve, to grow stronger, to develop individuality and personality day by day!  Life, present and hereafter, was growth, development, the opportunity for service in a cause.  To cease growing was to die.

He perceived at last the form all religion takes is that of consecration to a Cause,—­one of God’s many causes.  The meaning of life is to find one’s Cause, to lose one’s self in it.  His was the liberation of the Word,—­now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the ashes.  The phrase was Alison’s.  To help liberate the Church, fan into flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the selfishness of the world, until the Garvins, the Kate Marcys, the stunted children, and anaemic women were no longer possible.

It was Royce who, in one illuminating sentence, solved for him the puzzle, pointed out whence his salvation had come.  “For your cause can only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to love the unity of the spiritual life. . .  You must find it in human shape.”

Horace Bentley!

He, Hodder, had known this, but known it vaguely, without sanction.  The light had shone for him even in the darkness of that night in Dalton Street, when he thought to have lost it forever.  And he had awakened the next morning, safe,—­safe yet bewildered, like a half drowned man on warm sands in the sun.