ke orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
were given us to live by. And to trust our religions demands men first
of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world
which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature that man can
live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single
dogma and definition."

Yet it was not these religious philosophies which had saved him, though
the stimulus of their current had started his mind revolving like a
motor. Their function, he perceived now, was precisely to compel him to
see what had saved him, to reenforce it with the intellect, with the
reason, and enable him to save others. The current set up,--by a
thousand suggestions of which he made notes,--a personal construction,
coordination, and he had the exhilaration of feeling, within him, a
creative process all his own. Behold a mystery 'a paradox'--one of many.
As his strength grew greater day by day, as his vision grew clearer, he
must exclaim with Paul: "Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with
me!"

He, Hodder, was but an instrument transmitting power. And yet--oh
paradox!--the instrument continued to improve, to grow stronger, to
develop individuality and personality day by day! Life, present and
hereafter, was growth, development, the opportunity for service in a
cause. To cease growing was to die.

He perceived at last the form all religion takes is that of consecration
to a Cause,--one of God's many causes. The meaning of life is to find
one's Cause, to lose one's self in it. His was the liberation of the
Word,--now vouchsafed to him; the freeing of the spark from under the
ashes. The phrase was Alison's. To help liberate the Church, fan into
flame the fire which was to consume the injustice, the tyranny, the
selfishness of the world, until the Garvins, the Kate Marcys, the stunted
children, and anaemic women were no longer possible.

It was Royce who, in one illuminating sentence, solved for him the
puzzle, pointed out whence his salvation had come. "For your cause can
only be revealed to you through some presence that first teaches you to
love the unity of the spiritual life. . . You must find it in human
shape."

Horace Bentley!

He, Hodder, had known this, but known it vaguely, without sanction. The
light had shone for him even in the darkness of that night in Dalton
Street, when he thought to have lost it forever. And he had awakened the
next morning, safe,-