he
loss of a child, an Indian famine, could shake it but not overthrow it.
Then coming back one day from some races in France, he was knocked down
by an automobile and hurt very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and
mind. His sufferings caused much suffering to others. He did his utmost
to see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and
the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a fine
essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he could not do
so. His confidence in the benevolent intervention of God was altogether
destroyed. His book tells of this shattering, and how labouriously
he reconstructed his religion upon less confident lines. It is a book
typical of an age and of a very English sort of mind, a book well worth
reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but how
near he came to God, let one quotation witness.

"The existence of an outside Providence," he writes, "who created us,
who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful Father,
we have found impossible longer to believe in. But of the existence of a
Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate beings, and finding its
fullest expression, in man in love, and in the flowers in beauty, we
can be as certain as of anything in the world. This fiery spiritual
impulsion at the centre and the source of things, ever burning in us,
is the supremely important factor in our existence. It does not always
attain to light. In many directions it fails; the conditions are too
hard and it is utterly blocked. In others it only partially succeeds.
But in a few it bursts forth into radiant light. There are few who
in some heavenly moment of their lives have not been conscious of its
presence. We may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know
that it is there." . . .

God does not guide our feet. He is no sedulous governess restraining
and correcting the wayward steps of men. If you would fly into the air,
there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly for you or keep an
ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a glacier, no God nor angel
guides your steps amidst the slippery places. He will not even mind your
innocent children for you if you leave them before an unguarded fire.
Cherish no delusions; for yourself and others you challenge danger and
chance on your own strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those
you care for. Nothing of such th