the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,
now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,

a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting
between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps,

now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost
unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now

warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems,
unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of

its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as
one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a

disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the
time that a writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was

to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional
religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord, but

it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.
Religion was the privilege of the pulpit....

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was
ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the

discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and
apologetic part in public affairs. And this was done not out of

contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious organisations
upon men's respect was still enormous, so enormous that there

seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the
developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion

lasted over into the beginnings of the new age. It was the clear
vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary

influence which brought it back into the texture of human life.
He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious

reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as
land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the

Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from
the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought

to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and
obscurely in the universalacceptance of the greater state. He

gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and
perspectives of the new dawn....

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of
the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their

chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as
one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth

century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change
than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show

'life as it is,' the latter showed life as it changes. More and
more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or

suffering from the effects of world changes. And as we come up
to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the

everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is
continually more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so

well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship
that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery

of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited
ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted

against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.
They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched

away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make
peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still

strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening
egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing

social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to
capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical

misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of
adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the

universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to
happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The

clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more
certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation

for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for
those upon it who will follow it far enough....

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former
time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether

the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But
assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many

temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of
world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and

war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more
ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind

has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to
find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases

of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out
to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably

upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian,
as his thought grows clearer, arrive at the world republic. As

for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and
successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from

such claims and consistencies.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
Section 1

The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new
station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above

the Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.
It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in

the world affords. The graniteterrace which runs round the four
sides of the low block of laboratories looks out in every

direction upon mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a
shadowy blue cleft, the river pours down in its tumultuous

passage to the swarming plains of India. No sound of its roaring
haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in

which whole forests of giant deodars seem no more than small
patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured rock,

fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.
These are the northward wall of a toweringwilderness of ice and

snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the
culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest.

Here are cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and
deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here

are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders
lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among them

under the untempered sunshine. To the northward, and blocking
out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of

porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and
peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered rock

above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise
peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far

away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up
abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.

Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high
over the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of

the ultimate Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the
southward wall dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as

he soared down to it like a toy lost among these mountain
wildernesses. No road came up to this place; it was reached only

by flight.
His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted

by his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made
his way to the officials who came out to receive him.

In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,
surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing

fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to
eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power

was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened