the sense of God. But God is a word that covers a multitude of
meanings. When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I defied
God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions and
pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
do still deny him and repudiate him. That God I heard of first from
my nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the
nursemaids of mankind. But there is another God than that God of
obedience, God the immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from
home and country, God scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in
a nail-pierced body out of death and came not to bring peace but a
sword."

With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished
when he died.

(Surely the man was not a Christian!)

"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you
cannot suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain
because you have identified your life with the honour of mankind and
the insatiable adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the
possible death is negligible and the possible achievement altogether
outweighs it." . . .

White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.

He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had
always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever.