our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.

Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of

confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish

temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,

catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a

nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to assuage

my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards

for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised

ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To console

ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and

our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though

those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the

germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such

as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.

That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition

shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.

I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my

real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an

unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be

by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal

would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting

relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should

follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and

follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good

comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I

should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I

should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much

absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and

missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming

flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem

sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because

I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not

mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think

finely. I remember how I fell talking to God-I think I talked out

loud. "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so

little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of

men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"

I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought

I had a gleam of you in Isabel,-and then you take her away. Do you

reallythink I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in

darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half

dying?"

Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange

parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine

thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it

possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that

system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very

beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to

Christ? It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid. I

went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I

had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with

hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to

a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public

satisfaction in His fate…

It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered

dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He

DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon

they'd made of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient

enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and

gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He

wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My