He considered them, those whirling worlds, at night.  Once they had been the candles of Jehovah, to light the path of his chosen nation, to herald the birth of his Son.  And now?  How many billions of blind, struggling creatures clung to them?  Where now was this pin-point of humanity, in the midst of an appalling spectacle of a grinding, remorseless nature?

And that obscure Event on which he had staked his hopes?  Was He, as John had written, the First Born of the Universe, the Word Incarnate of a system that defied time and space, the Logos of an outworn philosophy?  Was that Universe conscious, as Berkeley had declared, or the blind monster of substance alone, or energy, as some modern scientists brutally and triumphantly maintained?  Where was the Spirit that breathed in it of hope?

Such were some of the questions that thronged for solution.  What was mind, what spirit? an attenuated vapour of the all-pervading substance?

He could not permit himself to dwell on these thoughts—­madness lay that way.  Madness, and a watching demon that whispered of substance, and sought to guide his wanderings in the night.  Hodder clung to the shell of reality, to the tiny panorama of the visible and the finite, to the infinitesimal gropings that lay recorded before him on the printed page.  Let him examine these first, let him discover—­despite the price—­what warrant the mind of man (the only light now vouchsafed to him in his darkness) gave him to speculate and to hope concerning the existence of a higher, truer Reality than that which now tossed and wounded him.  It were better to know.

Scarcely had the body been lifted from the tree than the disputes commenced, the adulterations crept in.  The spontaneity, the fire and zeal of the self-sacrificing itinerant preachers gave place to the paralyzing logic then pervading the Roman Empire, and which had sent its curse down the ages to the modern sermon; the geometrical rules of Euclid were made to solve the secrets of the universe.  The simple faith of the cross which had inspired the martyr along the bloody way from Ephesus to the Circus at Rome was formalized by degrees into philosophy:  the faith of future ages was settled by compromises, by manipulation, by bribery in Councils of the Church which resembled modern political conventions, and in which pagan Emperors did not hesitate to exert their influence over the metaphysical bishops of the factions.  Recriminations, executions, murders—­so the chronicles ran.

The prophet, the idealist disappeared, the priest with his rites and ceremonies and sacrifices, his power to save and damn, was once more in possession of the world.

The Son of Man was degraded into an infant in his mother’s arms.  An unhealthy, degenerating asceticism, drawn from pagan sources, began with the monks and anchorites of Egypt and culminated in the spectacle of Simeon’s pillar.  The mysteries of Eleusis, of Attis, Mithras, Magna Mater and Isis developed into Christian sacraments—­the symbol became the thing itself.  Baptism the confession of the new life, following the customs of these cults, became initiation; and from the same superstitious origins, the repellent materialistic belief that to eat of the flesh and drink of the blood of a god was to gain immortality:  immortality of the body, of course.