bitually on the
sunny side of their misery-line, the depressed and melancholy live
beyond it, in darkness and apprehension. There are men who seem to
have started in life with a bottle or two of champagne inscribed to
their credit; whilst others seem to have been born close to the
pain-threshold, which the slightest irritants fatally send them over.

Does it not appear as if one who lived more habitually on one side of
the pain-threshold might need a different sort of religion from one who
habitually lived on the other? This question, of the relativity of
different types of religion to different types of need, arises
naturally at this point, and will became a serious problem ere we have
done. But before we confront it in general terms, we must address
ourselves to the unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls, as we
may call them in contrast to the healthy-minded, have to say of the
secrets of their prison-house, their own peculiar form of
consciousness. Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born
and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in
spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the Universe!--God's in his
Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity,
pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a
profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the
meaning of the situation.

To begin with, how CAN things so insecure as the successful experiences
of this world afford a stable anchorage? A chain is no stronger than
its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

In the healthiest and most prosperous existence, how many links of
illness, danger, and disaster are always interposed? Unsuspectedly
from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said,
something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the
delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive
as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and
often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at
their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon
it.

Of course the music can commence again;--and again and again--at
intervals. But with this the healthy-minded consciousness is left with
an irremediable sense of precariousness. It is a bell with a crack; it
draws its breath on sufferance and by an accident.

Even if we suppose a man so packed with