y
it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should
assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still
indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found
this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here
in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the
supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced
attendance in that thought. He looked about him with genuine and candid
interest. The hush, the dim light, the rows upon rows of sober-faced
people, seemed to him properly impressive. He was struck by the wealth
of flowers massed all over the chancel, and wondered if that was its
regular state. The pulpit and the lectern; the altar, which he easily
identified; the stained-glass windows with their obviously symbolic
pictures; the bronze pipes of the little organ; the unvested choir,
whose function he vaguely made out--over all these his intelligent eye
swept, curiously; and lastly it went out of the open window and lost
itself in the quiet sunny woods outside.

Strange and full of wonder. This incredible instinct for adoration--this
invincible insistence in believing, in defiance of all reason, that man
was not born to die as the flesh dies. What, after all, was the full
significance of this unique phenomenon?

_I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live...._

A loud resonant voice suddenly cut the hush with these words and
immediately they were all standing. Queed was among the first to rise;
the movement was like a reflex action. For there was something in the
thrilling timbre of that voice that seemed to pull him to his feet
regardless of his will; something, in fact, that impelled him to crane
his neck around and peer down the dim aisle to discover immediately who
was the author of it.

His eye fell on a young man advancing, clad in white robes the like of
which he had never seen, and wearing the look of the morning upon his
face. In his hands he bore an open book, but he did not glance at it.
His head was thrown back; his eyes seemed fastened on something outside
and beyond the church; and he rolled out the victorious words as though
he would stake all that he held dearest in this world that their
prophecy was true.

_Whom I shall see for myself, and_ MINE _eyes shall behold, and not
another...._

But behind the young man r