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 i