xed perfumery and silly courteous gestures,
his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind!
He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: but
sometimes he suspected that he loved them as God does--at a judicious
distance. From his rather haphazard religious training, strange words
came back to him. "For God so loved the world..." So loved the world
that--that what? That He sent someone else... Some day he must think
this out. But you can't think things out. They think themselves,
suddenly, amazingly. The city itself is God, he cried. Was not God's
ultimate promise something about a city--The City of God? Well, but that
was only symbolic language. The city--of course that was only a symbol
for the race--for all his kind. The entire species, the whole aspiration
and passion and struggle, that was God.

On the ferries, at night, after supper, was his favourite place for
meditation. Some undeniable instinct drew him ever and again out of
the deep and shut ravines of stone, to places where he could feed on
distance. That is one of the subtleties of this straight and narrow
city, that though her ways are cliffed in, they are a long thoroughfare
for the eye: there is always a far perspective. But best of all to go
down to her environing water, where spaces are wide: the openness that
keeps her sound and free. Ships had words for him: they had crossed many
horizons: fragments of that broken blue still shone on their cutting
bows. Ferries, the most poetical things in the city, were nearly empty
at night: he stood by the rail, saw the black outline of the town slide
by, saw the lower sky gilded with her merriment, and was busy thinking.

Now about a God (he said to himself)--instinct tells me that there is
one, for when I think about Him I find that I unconsciously wag my tail
a little. But I must not reason on that basis, which is too puppyish. I
like to think that there is, somewhere in this universe, an inscrutable
Being of infinite wisdom, harmony, and charity, by Whom all my desires
and needs would be understood; in association with Whom I would find
peace, satisfaction, a lightness of heart that exceed my present
understanding. Such a Being is to me quite inconceivable; yet I feel
that if I met Him, I would instantly understand. I do not mean that I
would understand Him: but I would understand my relationship to Him,
which would be perfect. Nor do I mean that it would be always
happy; mere