heart, and erects the horrible ideal of a Creator who deliberately
condemns the vast mass of His creatures to a fate which He has no less
deliberately created them to abhor and dread.

Our main temptation after all lies in the fact that we are so impatient
of any delay or any uneasiness. We are like the child who, when first
confronted with suffering, cannot bear to believe in its existence, and
who, if it is prolonged, cannot believe in the existence of anything
else. What we have rather to do is to face the problem strongly and
courageously, to take into account the worst and feeblest possibilities
of our nature, and yet not to overlook the fact that the worst and
lowest specimen of humanity has a dim inkling of something higher and
happier, to which he would attain if he knew how.

I had a little object-lesson a few days ago in the subject. It was a
Bank Holiday, and I walked pensively about the outskirts of a big town.
The streets were crowded with people of all sorts and sizes. I confess
that a profound melancholy was induced in me by the spectacle of the
young of both sexes. They were enjoying themselves, it is true, with all
their might; and I could not help wondering why, as a rule, they should
enjoy themselves so offensively. The girls walked about, tittering
and ogling, the young men were noisy, selfish, ill-mannered, enjoying
nothing so much as the discomfiture of any passer-by. They pushed each
other into ditches, they tripped up a friend who passed on a bicycle,
and all roared in concert at the rueful way in which he surveyed a muddy
coat and torn trousers. There seemed to be not the slightest idea among
them of contributing to each other's pleasure. The point was to be
amused at the expense of another, and to be securely obstreperous.

But among these there were lovers walking, faint and pale with mutual
admiration; a young couple led along a hideous over-dressed child,
and had no eyes for anything except its clumsy movements and fatuous
questions. Or an elderly couple strolled along, pleased and contented,
with a married son and daughter. The cure of the vile mirth of youth
seemed after all to be love and the anxious care of other lives.

And thus indeed a gentle optimism did emerge, after all, from the
tangle. I felt that it was strange that there should be so much to breed
dissatisfaction. I struck out of the town, and soon was passing a mill
in broad water-meadows, overhung by great elms; the grass