h."

"That's the Jew God the Christians took over. It's a Quack God, a
Panacea. It's not my God."

Letty considered these strange ideas.

"I never thought of Him like that," she said at last. "It makes it all
seem different."

"Nor did I. But I do now.... I have suddenly found it and seen it plain.
I see it so plain that I am amazed that I have not always seen it.... It
is, you see, so easy to understand that there is a God, and how complex
and wonderful and brotherly He is, when one thinks of those dear boys
who by the thousand, by the hundred thousand, have laid down their
lives.... Ay, and there were German boys too who did the same.... The
cruelties, the injustice, the brute aggression--they saw it differently.
They laid down their lives--they laid down their lives.... Those dear
lives, those lives of hope and sunshine....

"Don't you see that it must be like that, Letty? Don't you see that it
must be like that?"

"No," she said, "I've seen things differently from that."

"But it's so plain to me," said Mr. Britling. "If there was nothing else
in all the world but our kindness for each other, or the love that made
you weep in this kind October sunshine, or the love I bear Hugh--if
there was nothing else at all--if everything else was cruelty and
mockery and filthiness and bitterness, it would still be certain that
there was a God of love and righteousness. If there were no signs of God
in all the world but the godliness we have seen in those two boys of
ours; if we had no other light but the love we have between us....

"You don't mind if I talk like this?" said Mr. Britling. "It's all I can
think of now--this God, this God who struggles, who was in Hugh and
Teddy, clear and plain, and how He must become the ruler of the
world...."

"This God who struggles," she repeated. "I have never thought of Him
like that."

"Of course He must be like that," said Mr. Britling. "How can God be a
Person; how can He be anything that matters to man, unless He is limited
and defined and--human like ourselves.... With things outside Him and
beyond Him."

Section 11

Letty walked back slowly through the fields of stubble to her cottage.

She had been talking to Mr. Britling for an hour, and her mind was full
of the thought of this changed and simplified man, who talked of God as
he might have done of a bird he had seen or of a tree he had sheltered
under. And all mixed up with this thought of Mr. Britling was this