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.

“The will of the spiritual world, the divine will, revealed in man.”  What sublime thoughts, as old as the Cross itself, yet continually and eternally new!

III

There was still another whose face was constantly before him, and the reflection of her distressed yet undaunted soul,—­Alison Parr.  The contemplation of her courage, of her determination to abide by nothing save the truth, had had a power over him that he might not estimate, and he loved her as a man loves a woman, for her imperfections.  And he loved her body and her mind.

One morning, as he walked back from Mrs. Bledsoe’s through an unfrequented, wooded path of the Park, he beheld her as he had summoned her in his visions.  She was sitting motionless, gazing before her with clear eyes, as at the Fates. . .