THE UNDYING FIRE
He turned to Dr. Barrack. "You think," he said, "that there is a will in this Process of yours which will take things somewhere, somewhere definitely greater or better or onward. I hold that there is no will at all except in and through ourselves. If there be any will at all. . . I hold that even your maxim 'be ourselves' is a paradox, for we cannot be ourselves until we have lost ourselves in God. I have talked to Sir Eliphaz and to you since you came in, of the boundless disorder and evil of nature. Let me talk to you now of the boundless miseries that arise from the disorderliness of men and that must continue age after age until either men are united in spirit and in truth or destroyed through their own incoherence. Whether men will be lost or saved I do not know. There have been times when I was sure that God would triumph in us. . . . But dark shadows have fallen upon my spirit. . . .
"Consider the posture of men's affairs now, consider where they stand to-day, because they have not yet begun to look deeply and frankly into realities; because, as they put it, they take life as they find it, because they are themselves, heedless of history, and do not realise that in truth they are but parts in one great adventure in space and time. For four years now the world has been marching deeper and deeper into tragedy. . . . Our life that seemed so safe grows insecure and more and more insecure. . . . Six million soldiers, six million young men, have been killed on the battlefields alone; three times as many have been crippled and mutilated; as many again who were not soldiers have been destroyed.
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