separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He
has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a
mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical _encore_. Heaven may _encore_
the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth
a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin,
the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life
or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that
they 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