said."

"You want to work out your own salvation," said Scrope to his
daughter.

"No one else can," she answered. "I'm--I'm grown up."
"Even if it hurts?"

"To live is to be hurt somehow," she said. "This--This--" She
flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to

be stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned
or to decay....

Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He
liked the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his

brows. He liked him altogether. He pronounced his verdict slowly.
"I suppose, after all," he said, "that this is better than the

tender solicitude of a safe and prosperous middleaged man.
Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking to-day that a father who

stands between his children and hardship, by doing wrong, may
really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me.

I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation." He got
up. "I go west," he said, "presently. You, I think, go east."

"I can assure you, Sir," the young man began.
Scrope held his hand out. "Take your life in your own way," he

said.
He turned to Eleanor. "Talk as you will," he said.

She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the
waiting young man, who saluted.

"You'll come back to supper?" Scrope said, without thinking out
the implications of that invitation.

She assented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover
were to go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded

all other considerations. The two young people turned to each
other.

Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.
For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the

two young people as they went eastward. As they walked their
shoulders and elbows bumped amicably together.

(10)
Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his

thoughts. He knew that he had been dealing with some very
tremendous and urgent problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he

remembered that Eleanor at the time of her approach had seemed to
be a solution rather than an interruption. Well, she had her own

life. She was making her own life. Instead of solving his
problems she was solving her own. God bless those dear grave

children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was. That
eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable

death. The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the
trenches.

Love, death, God; this war was bringing the whole world back to
elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and

comfort were at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was
here. And he had been thinking--What had he been thinking?

He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in
his mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new

light was falling upon it now, cast by the tragicillumination of
these young lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not

see how reality had come to all things through that one intense
reality. He reverted to the question as he had put it to himself,

before first he recoguized Eleanor. Did he believe in God? Should
he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no longer

believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to
God's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the

years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?
Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy

now, and the hardships of poverty seemed less black than the
hardship of a youthful death.

Did he believe in God? Again he put that fundamental question
to himself.

He sat very still in the sunset peace, with his eyes upon the
steel mirror of the waters. The question seemed to fill the whole

scene, to wait, even as the water and sky and the windless trees
were waiting....

And then by imperceptible degrees there grew in Scrope's mind
the persuasion that he was in the presence of the living God.

This time there was no vision of angels nor stars, no snapping of
bow-strings, no throbbing of the heart nor change of scene, no

magic and melodramatic drawing back of the curtain from the
mysteries; the water and the bridge, the ragged black trees, and

a distant boat that broke the silvery calm with an arrow of black
ripples, all these things were still before him. But God was

there too. God was everywhere about him. This persuasion was over
him and about him; a dome of protection, a power in his nerves, a

peace in his heart. It was an exalting beauty; it was a perfected
conviction.... This indeed was the coming of God, the real coming

of God. For the first time Scrope was absolutely sure that for
the rest of his life he would possess God. Everything that had so

perplexed him seemed to be clear now, and his troubles lay at the
foot of this last complete realization like a litter of dust and

leaves in the foreground of a sunlit, snowy mountain range.
It was a little incredible that he could ever have doubted.

(11)
It was a phase of extremeintellectual clairvoyance. A

multitude of things that hitherto had been higgledy-piggledy,
contradictory and incongruous in his mind became lucid, serene,

full and assured. He seemed to see all things plainly as one sees
things plainly through perfectly clear still water in the shadows

of a summer noon. His doubts about God, his periods of complete
forgetfulness and disregard of God, this conflict of his

instincts and the habits and affections of his daily life with
the service of God, ceased to be perplexing incompatibilities and

were manifest as necessary, understandable aspects of the
business of living.

It was no longer a riddle that little immediate things should
seem of more importance than great and final things. For man is a

creature thrusting his way up from the beast to divinity, from
the blindness of individuality to the knowledge of a common end.

We stand deep in the engagements of our individual lives looking
up to God, and only realizing in our moments of exaltation that

through God we can escape from and rule and alter the whole
world-wide scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of

illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to
man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations,

ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and
essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as

our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later
revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still

remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an
apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear

and with ceremonial surgeries, blood sacrifices, and the maddest
barbarities of thought. We are only beginning to realize that God

is here; so far as our minds go he is still not here continually;
we perceive him and then again we are blind to him. God is the

last thing added to the completeness of human life. To most His
presence is imperceptible throughout their lives; they know as

little of him as a savage knows of the electric waves that beat
through us for ever from the sun. All this appeared now so clear

and necessary to Scrope that he was astonished he had ever found
the quality of contradiction in these manifest facts.

In this unprecedented lucidity that had now come to him, Scrope
saw as a clear and simple necessity that there can be no such

thing as a continuous living presence of God in our lives. That
is an reasonable" target="_blank" title="a.不合理的；荒唐的">unreasonable desire. There is no permanent exaltation of

belief. It is contrary to the nature of life. One cannot keep
actively believing in and realizing God round all the twenty-four

hours any more than one can keep awake through the whole cycle of
night and day, day after day. If it were possible so to apprehend