admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every
human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at
any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation
after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last
appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish
emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely
felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful:
now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they
were WILFUL. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises
of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world
involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.
And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious;
that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose,
there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story:
and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition.
It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions.
The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.
Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had
called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable
that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type.
He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar
system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should
a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to
a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God,
then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image;