e.

For weeks his mind had been playing about this idea. He had talked to
Letty of this Finite God, who is the king of man's adventure in space
and time. But hitherto God had been for him a thing of the intelligence,
a theory, a report, something told about but not realised.... Mr.
Britling's thinking about God hitherto had been like some one who has
found an empty house, very beautiful and pleasant, full of the promise
of a fine personality. And then as the discoverer makes his lonely,
curious explorations, he hears downstairs, dear and friendly, the voice
of the Master coming in....

There was no need to despair because he himself was one of the feeble
folk. God was with him indeed, and he was with God. The King was coming
to his own. Amidst the darknesses and confusions, the nightmare
cruelties and the hideous stupidities of the great war, God, the Captain
of the World Republic, fought his way to empire. So long as one did
one's best and utmost in a cause so mighty, did it matter though the
thing one did was little and poor?

"I have thought too much of myself," said Mr. Britling, "and of what I
would do by myself. I have forgotten _that which was with me_...."

Section 10

He turned over the rest of the night's writing presently, and read it
now as though it was the work of another man.

These later notes were fragmentary, and written in a sprawling hand.

_"Let us make ourselves watchers and guardians of the order of the
world...._

_"If only for love of our dead...._

_"Let us pledge ourselves to service. Let us set ourselves with all
our minds and all our hearts to the perfecting and working out of
the methods of democracy and the ending for ever of the kings and
emperors and priestcrafts and the bands of adventurers, the traders
and owners and forestallers who have betrayed mankind into this
morass of hate and blood--in which our sons are lost--in which we
flounder still...."_

How feeble was this squeak of exhortation! It broke into a scolding
note.

"Who have betrayed," read Mr. Britling, and judged the phrase.

"Who have fallen with us," he amended....

"One gets so angry and bitter--because one feels alone, I suppose.
Because one feels that for them one's reason is no reason. One is
enraged by the sense of their silent and regardless contradiction, and
one forgets the Power of which one is a part...."

The sheet that bore the sentence he criticised