for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it
may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and
yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions
meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts
to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to
think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were _wilful_. I
mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In
short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I
thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound
emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has
some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always
felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a
story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against
the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it
loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would
have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and
therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an
imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion
that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma
of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any
more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of
God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image;
what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to
argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small
compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong
imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and
annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their
ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and
their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil
influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later
scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H.G. Wells.
Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as
wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should
lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.

But the expansion of which I s