the
wind above the buried shrines of Mexico. All these dead truths that from
time to time had encumbered the living world. Each in its turn had had
to be cleared away.

And yet was it altogether a dead truth: this passionate belief in a
personal God who had ordered all things for the best: who could be
appealed to for comfort, for help? Might it not be as good an
explanation as any other of the mystery surrounding us? It had been so
universal. She was not sure where, but somewhere she had come across an
analogy that had strongly impressed her. "The fact that a man feels
thirsty--though at the time he may be wandering through the Desert of
Sahara--proves that somewhere in the world there is water." Might not
the success of Christianity in responding to human needs be evidence in
its favour? The Love of God, the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, the Grace
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Were not all human needs provided for in that
one comprehensive promise: the desperate need of man to be convinced that
behind all the seeming muddle was a loving hand guiding towards good; the
need of the soul in its loneliness for fellowship, for strengthening; the
need of man in his weakness for the kindly grace of human sympathy, of
human example.

And then, as fate would have it, the first lesson happened to be the
story of Jonah and the whale. Half a dozen shocked faces turned suddenly
towards her told Joan that at some point in the thrilling history she
must unconsciously have laughed. Fortunately she was alone in the pew,
and feeling herself scarlet, squeezed herself into its farthest corner
and drew down her veil.

No, it would have to go. A religion that solemnly demanded of grown men
and women in the twentieth century that they should sit and listen with
reverential awe to a prehistoric edition of "Grimm's Fairy Stories,"
including Noah and his ark, the adventures of Samson and Delilah, the
conversations between Balaam and his ass, and culminating in what if it
were not so appallingly wicked an idea would be the most comical of them
all: the conception of an elaborately organized Hell, into which the God
of the Christians plunged his creatures for all eternity! Of what use
was such a religion as that going to be to the world of the future?

She must have knelt and stood mechanically, for the service was ended.
The pulpit was occupied by an elderly uninteresting-looking man with a
troublesome cough. But one sentence he ha