is the joy of the centuries yet to be. In nameless graves lie the
dream-children who will never now be born. This criminal sealing up of
the very fountain of life--how can we bear it?

And yet we open not our mouths in protest. Is it because we are losing
our sensitiveness--becoming brutalised? It might be that. For nothing
coarsens the mind like that tide of hatred and passion which war sends
sweeping through the hearts of men. And yet it is not that. For when
they told the mother, breaking it gently as love alone can do, that her
son was dead, she bowed her head in silence, yielding herself to the
solace of tears; but in a little while she said brokenly: "It is good
to die so: I would not have my son shelter himself behind other
mothers' sons."

No, it is not because we are already coarsened that the heart can bear.
It is rather because we have realised with the passing away of the old
world of the last long summer days (it seems already centuries remote)
that there are some things so great that they can transfigure even
death. When the loyalty to the highest can only be fulfilled through
death, we acquiesce in the sacrifice. In our parish we have not been
coarsened--we have been quickened.

***

It seems as if it were in another era that my friend at the top of the
Gallows' Road proved to me convincingly that death alone was king.
With a keen irony he depicted this little globule of a world, a
third-rate satellite of a fifth-rate star, floating in the abysses, in
relation to the universe but as a mere grain of sand amid all the sand
on the world's shores; and on that puny speck of a world he pictured
the ephemeral generations, mere flashes of troubled consciousness--and
then darkness.

It was reasonable when they thought this world the centre of all
things, with the sun and moon and stars circling it round as humble
ministrants, that they should believe in some high destiny for
themselves. But now that they know how miserably and unspeakably
insignificant the world is, it was but vanity and arrogance for any man
to think of himself as of any value whatever in the scheme of things.
His life was as the flashing of a midge's wings. His end was as a
candle blown out in the night.

***

One evening, when the air was vibrant with the melody of birds and
laden with the perfume of the roses that filled the garden, he
developed another train of thought. He pictured the glut of life there
would be if all