rmoil. He rose early
while the day was still holding the hand of dawn and went out to the
cliff edge, as if there in the heaving waters he might read the
Eternal Meaning and Purpose of it all. He thought how every individual
man is one with the great tide of humanity, advancing with it,
receding with it, subject to one eternal law he could not read. How
the suffering and sin of one was the burden of all: the heroic
endeavours and victories of one the gain of all. The little isolated
aim of the individual must subject itself to the wider meaning or be
swept back to nothingness, just as the stranded pools among the rocks
that for a few hours caught the sunshine and reflected the heavenly
lamp, but were overswept each tide and their being mingled again with
the great sea.

Christopher knew the work he had done had been good, that hundreds
were the happier for his direct concern with their lives, that he
indeed had made the Road of Life more possible for those who would set
out thereon for far or nearer goals. It was all he aspired to do. He
knew it was not his to show them the goal, or to direct them thereto;
that was for themselves and others; but it was his to make the way
possible, that they need not stumble on unbroken ground, or toil in
blinding dust of ages, or wade in clogging mud of tradition, these
children of the world who tramped with patient feet to a vague end.

What was wrong was that he had chosen his own ground, that when he
had stood at the cross roads of life he held himself qualified as a
god to say "that road is evil and this good," taking council only of
what was most in accord with his own will, forgetting that the Great
Power embraces all within itself, knowing no good or evil, but seeing
only a means to fulfil the eternal purpose of creation. It is we who
must be the alchemists to transmute what we term evil into good, we,
who are the servants and instruments by which that purpose must be
achieved. If, seeing evil, we pass by on the other side, how shall the
waste places of the earth be cleansed or the wilderness break forth
into song?

The message so roughly delivered had sunk into Christopher's heart at
last. Looking back at his life he saw how everything had fitted him
for the task he had refused. How he was born to it, trained to its
needs unconsciously by his mother and Caesar, shaped by his own
experience, armed by the completion of his inner life in his marriage.
He had refused it with bl