spect of things began to lay hold upon him; his
soul turned itself away from the sun, and entered into the shadow of the
under-world. Like the white-horsed twins of lake Regillus, like Phoebe,
the queen of skyey plain and earthly forest, every boy and girl, every
man and woman, that lives at all, has to divide many a year between
Tartarus and Olympus.

For now arose within him, not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms
of a theology which would explain all God's doings by low conceptions,
low I mean for humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only
taking refuge in the fact of the incapacity of the human understanding
when its own inventions are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell
is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as
hell. Hence, as foundations must be laid in the deepest, the system is
founded in hell, and the first article in the creed that Robert Falconer
learned was, 'I believe in hell.' Practically, I mean, it was so; else
how should it be that as often as a thought of religious duty arose in
his mind, it appeared in the form of escaping hell, of fleeing from the
wrath to come? For his very nature was hell, being not born in sin and
brought forth in iniquity, but born sin and brought forth iniquity. And
yet God made him. He must believe that. And he must believe, too, that
God was just, awfully just, punishing with fearful pains those who did
not go through a certain process of mind which it was utterly impossible
they should go through without a help which he would give to some, and
withhold from others, the reason of the difference not being such,
to say the least of it, as to come within the reach of the persons
concerned. And this God they said was love. It was logically absurd, of
course, yet, thank God, they did say that God was love; and many of them
succeeded in believing it, too, and in ordering their ways as if the
first article of their creed had been 'I believe in God'; whence, in
truth, we are bound to say it was the first in power and reality, if
not in order; for what are we to say a man believes, if not what he acts
upon? Still the former article was the one they brought chiefly to bear
upon their children. This mortar, probably they thought, threw the shell
straighter than any of the other field-pieces of the church-militant.
Hence it was even in justification of God himself that a party arose to
say that a man could believe without the help