hat
my soul should be lost; they have not willed to save me; they have not
tried that I should forgive them!'

"I said to him, 'See here, be thou content; do not forgive: forget this
soul and its injury; go on your way. In the next world perhaps--'

"He cried, 'Go from me, you understand nothing! What is the next world
to me! I am lost now, today. I cannot see the sunlight shine, the dust
is in my throat, the sand is in my eyes! Go from me, you know nothing!
Oh, once again before I die to see that the world is beautiful! Oh, God,
God, I cannot live and not love. I cannot live and hate. Oh, God, God,
God!' So I left him crying out and came back here."

God said, "This man's soul must be saved."

And the angel said "How?"

God said, "Go down you, and save it."

The angel said, "What more shall I do?"

Then God bent down and whispered in the angel's ear, and the angel
spread out its wings and went down to earth.

And partly I woke, sitting there upon the broken stone with my head on
my knee; but I was too weary to rise. I heard the wind roam through the
olive trees and among the ruined arches, and then I slept again.

The angel went down and found the man with the bitter heart and took him
by the hand, and led him to a certain spot.

Now the man wist not where it was the angel would take him nor what he
would show him there. And when they came the angel shaded the man's eyes
with his wing, and when he moved it the man saw somewhat on the earth
before them. For God had given it to that angel to unclothe a human
soul; to take from it all those outward attributes of form, and colour,
and age, and sex, whereby one man is known from among his fellows and is
marked off from the rest, and the soul lay before them, bare, as a man
turning his eye inwards beholds himself.

They saw its past, its childhood, the tiny life with the dew upon it;
they saw its youth when the dew was melting, and the creature raised its
Lilliputian mouth to drink from a cup too large for it, and they saw how
the water spilt; they saw its hopes that were never realized; they saw
its hours of intellectual blindness, men call sin; they saw its hours of
all-radiating insight, which men call righteousness; they saw its hour
of strength, when it leaped to its feet crying, "I am omnipotent;" its
hour of weakness, when it fell to the earth and grasped dust only; they
saw what it might have been, but never would be.

The man bent forward.

And the a