the whole world. There can be no doubt that it does enable many a timid
soul to get through life with a certain recklessness. And provided there
is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence theory works well. It would
work altogether well if there were no crevasses.

Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and escaped.
But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into a crevasse?

There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis
Younghusband called "Within." [Williams and Norgate, 1912.] It is the
confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in Providence
until he was already well advanced in years. He went through battles and
campaigns, he filled positions of great honour and responsibility, he
saw much of the life of men, without altogether losing his faith. The
loss of a child, an Indian famine, could shake it but not overthrow it.
Then coming back one day from some races in France, he was knocked down
by an automobile and hurt very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and
mind. His sufferings caused much suffering to others. He did his utmost
to see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and
the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a fine
essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he could not do
so. His confidence in the benevolent intervention of God was altogether
destroyed. His book tells of this shattering, and how labouriously
he reconstructed his religion upon less confident lines. It is a book
typical of an age and of a very English sort of mind, a book well worth
reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but how
near he came to God, let one quotation witness.