these trivial repetitions and exactitudes at every turn,
only they are too trivial even for conversation. A man named Williams
did walk into a strange house and murder a man named Williamson; it
sounds like a sort of infanticide. A journalist of my acquaintance
did move quite unconsciously from a place called Overstrand to a place
called Overroads. When he had made this escape he was very properly
pursued by a voting card from Battersea, on which a political agent
named Burn asked him to vote for a political candidate named Burns. And
when he did so another coincidence happened to him: rather a spiritual
than a material coincidence; a mystical thing, a matter of a magic
number.

For a sufficient number of reasons, the man I know went up to vote in
Battersea in a drifting and even dubious frame of mind. As the train
slid through swampy woods and sullen skies there came into his empty
mind those idle and yet awful questions which come when the mind is
empty. Fools make cosmic systems out of them; knaves make profane poems
out of them; men try to crush them like an ugly lust. Religion is
only the responsible reinforcement of common courage and common sense.
Religion only sets up the normal mood of health against the hundred
moods of disease.

But there is this about such ghastly empty enigmas, that they always
have an answer to the obvious answer, the reply offered by daily reason.
Suppose a man's children have gone swimming; suppose he is suddenly
throttled by the senseless--fear that they are drowned. The obvious
answer is, "Only one man in a thousand has his children drowned." But
a deeper voice (deeper, being as deep as hell) answers, "And why should
not you--be the thousandth man?" What is true of tragic doubt is true
also of trivial doubt. The voter's guardian devil said to him, "If you
don't vote to-day you can do fifteen things which will quite certainly
do some good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, please a
maddened publisher. And what good do you expect to do by voting? You
don't think your man will get in by one vote, do you?" To this he knew
the answer of common sense, "But if everybody said that, nobody would
get in at all." And then there came that deeper voice from Hades, "But
you are not settling what everybody shall do, but what one person on one
occasion shall do. If this afternoon you went your way about more solid
things, how would it matter and who would ever know?" Yet somehow the
voter d