uld it not last? The clouds began to darken over me again. I
heard voices once which I had hoped were for ever silenced. That sense
of sin and horror came upon me last night in the streets. I suffered
dreadfully."

She was silent, and, meeting Waymark's eyes so fixed on her own, became
conscious of the eagerness and fervour with which she had spoken.

"Have you any experience of such things?" she asked nervously. "Did you
ever suffer in the same way?"

"It is all very strange," he said, without answering her question.
"This overpowering consciousness of sin is an anachronism in our time.
But, from the way in which you express yourself, I should have thought
you had been studying Schopenhauer. I suppose you know nothing of him?"

"Nothing."

"Some of your phrases were precisely his. Your doctrine is simply
Pessimism, with an element of dogmatic faith added. With Schopenhauer,
the will to live is the root of sin; mortify this, deny the first
instincts of your being, and you approach righteousness. Buddhism has
the same system. And, in deducing all this from the plain teachings of
Christianity, I am disposed to think you are right and consistent.
Christianity _is_ pessimism, so far as this world is concerned; we see
that in such things as the thanksgiving for a' person's death in the
burial service, and the prayer that the end of the world may soon come."

He paused, and thought for a moment.

"But all this," he resumed, rising from his seat, and going to stand
with one arm upon the mantelpiece, "is of course, with me, mere matter
of speculation. There are two allegories, which define Pessimism and
Optimism. First that of Adam and Christ. Adam falls through eating of
the tree of knowledge; in other words, sin only comes with
self-consciousness, sin _is_ the conscious enjoyment of life. And,
according to this creed, it can only be overcome by abnegation, by the
denial of the will to live. Accordingly, Christ enters the world, and,
representing Humanity, as Adam had done, saves the world by denial, of
Himself, even to death. The other allegory is that of Prometheus. He
also represents mankind, and his stealing of the fire means man's
acquirement of a conscious soul, whereby he makes himself capable of
sin. The gods put him in bondage and torment, representing the
subjection to the flesh. But Prometheus is saved in a different way
from Adam; not by renunciation, but by the prowess of Hercules, that is
to say, the triu