A great calm was upon him, a lulling between the
tempest that had passed and the tempests that were coming, a forecast of
the serenity to which Humanity is reaching by Pain.

"What does it matter, after all?" he murmured to himself. "There is
nothing worth worrying over so long as one does one's best. Things are
coming along all right. We may be only stumbling towards the light but
we're getting there just the same. So long as we know that what does the
rest matter?"

"What am I?" he thought, looking up at the stars, which shone the
brighter because the moon was now hidden behind the train. "I am what I
am, as the, old Jew God was, as we all are. We think we can change
everything and we can change nothing. Our very thoughts and motives and
ideals are only bits of the Eternal Force that holds the stars balanced
in the skies and keeps the earth for a moment solid to our feet. I cannot
move it. I cannot affect it. I cannot shake it. It alone is."

"No more," he thought on, "can Eternal Force outside of me move me,
affect me, shake me. The force in me is as eternal, as indestructible, as
infinite, as the whole universal force. What it is I am too. The unknown
Law that gives trend to Force is manifest in me as much as it is in the
whole universe beside, yet no more than it is in the smallest atom that
floats in the air, in the smallest living thing that swims in a drop of
water. I am a part of that which is infinite and eternal and which
working through Man has made him conscious and given him a sense of
things and filled him with grand ideals sublime as the universe itself.
None of us can escape the Law even if we would because we are part of the
Law and because every act and every thought and every desire follows
along in us to that which has gone before and to the influences around,
just as the flight of a bullet is according to the weight of the bullet,
and its shape, and the pressure, and the direction it was fired, and the
wind."

"It is as easy," he dreamed on, "for the stars to rebel and start playing
nine-pins with one another, as it is for any man to swerve one hair's
breadth from that which is natural for him to do, he being what he is and
influences at any given time being what they are. None of us can help
anything. We are all poor devils, within whom the human desire to love
one another struggles with the brute desire to survive one another. And
the brute desire is being beaten down by the very Pain we cry o