overcast sky. The death squeal of some little beast caught suddenly in a
distant copse had set loose this train of thought. "Life struggling
under a birth curse?" he thought. "How nearly I come back at times to
the Christian theology!... And then, Redemption by the shedding of
blood."

"Life, like a rebellious child, struggling out of the control of the
hate which made it what it is."

But that was Mr. Britling's idea of Gnosticism, not of orthodox
Christianity. He went off for a time into faded reminiscences of
theological reading. What had been the Gnostic idea? That the God of the
Old Testament was the Devil of the New? But that had been the idea of
the Manichæans!...

Mr. Britling, between the black hedges, came back presently from his
attempts to recall his youthful inquiries into man's ancient
speculations, to the enduring riddles that have outlasted a thousand
speculations. Has hate been necessary, and is it still necessary, and
will it always be necessary? Is all life a war forever? The rabbit is
nimble, lives keenly, is prevented from degenerating into a diseased
crawling eater of herbs by the incessant ferret. Without the ferret of
war, what would life become?... War is murder truly, but is not Peace
decay?

It was during these prowling nights in the first winter of the war that
Mr. Britling planned a new writing that was to go whole abysses beneath
the facile superficiality of "And Now War Ends." It was to be called the
"Anatomy of Hate." It was to deal very faithfully with the function of
hate as a corrective to inefficiency. So long as men were slack, men