Ah, when the superstitions of remote peoples, the fables and myths, were taken away; when the manufactured history and determinism of the Israelites from the fall of man to the coming of that Messiah, whom the Jews crucified because he failed to bring them their material Kingdom, were discredited; when the polemic and literal interpretations of evangelists had been rejected, and the pious frauds of tampering monks; when the ascetic Buddhism was removed; the cults and mysteries, the dogmas of an ancient naive philosophy discarded; the crude science of a Ptolemy who conceived the earth as a flat terrestrial expanse and hell as a smoking pit beneath proved false; the revelation of a Holy City of jasper and gold and crystal, the hierarchy with its divine franchise to save and rule and conquer,—­when all these and more were eliminated from Christianity, what was left?

Hodder surveyed the ruins.  And his mind recalled, that Sunday of rain in New York which had been the turning-point in his life, when he had listened to the preacher, when he had walked the streets unmindful of the wet, led on by visions, racked by fears.  And the same terror returned to him now after all the years of respite, tenfold increased, of falling in the sight of man from the topmost tower.

What was to become of him, now that the very driving power of life was gone?  Where would he go? to what might he turn his hand, since all were vanity and illusion?  Careers meant nothing, had any indeed been possible to a man forty, left staring at stark reality after the rainbow had vanished.  Nineveh had mocked and conquered him who had thought himself a conqueror.  Self flew back and swung on its central pivot and took command.  His future, his fate, what was to become of him.  Who else now was to be considered?  And what was to restrain him from reaching out his hand to pluck the fruit which he desired? . . .

II

What control from the Unknown is this which now depresses and now releases the sensitive thing called the soul of man, and sends it upward again until the green light of hope shines through the surface water?  He might have grown accustomed, Holder thought, to the obscurity of the deeps; in which, after a while, the sharp agony of existence became dulled, the pressure benumbing.  He was conscious himself, at such times, of no inner recuperation.  Something drew him up, and he would find himself living again, at length to recognize the hand if not to comprehend the power.

The hand was Horace Bentley’s.

What was the source of that serenity which shone on the face of his friend?  Was it the light of faith?  Faith in—­what?  Humanity, Mr. Bentley had told him on that first evening when they had met:  faith in a world filled with cruelties, disillusionments, lies, and cheats!  On what Authority was it based?  Holder never asked, and no word of theology ever crossed Mr. Bentley’s lips; not by so much as a sign did he betray any knowledge he may have had of the drama taking place in Holder’s soul; no comment escaped him on the amazing anomalies of the life the rector was leading, in the Church but not of it.