American tourist, the text-book of the antiquary. A pity! Yes, but then
from the aesthetic point of view it was a pity that the groves of ancient
Greece had ever been cut down and replanted with currant bushes, their
altars scattered; that the stones of the temples of Isis should have come
to be the shelter of the fisher of the Nile; and the corn wave in the
wind above the buried shrines of Mexico. All these dead truths that from
time to time had encumbered the living world. Each in its turn had had
to be cleared away.

And yet was it altogether a dead truth: this passionate belief in a
personal God who had ordered all things for the best: who could be
appealed to for comfort, for help? Might it not be as good an
explanation as any other of the mystery surrounding us? It had been so
universal. She was not sure where, but somewhere she had come across an
analogy that had strongly impressed her. "The fact that a man feels
thirsty--though at the time he may be wandering through the Desert of
Sahara--proves that somewhere in the world there is water." Might not
the success of Christianity in responding to human needs be evidence in
its favour? The Love of God, the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, the Grace
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Were not all human needs provided for in that
one comprehensive promise: the desperate need of man to be convinced that
behind all the seeming muddle was a loving hand guiding towards good; the
need of the soul in its loneliness for fellowship, for strengthening; the
need of man in his weakness for the kindly grace of human sympathy, of
human example.

And then, as fate would have it, the first lesson happened to be the
story of Jonah and the whale. Half a dozen shocked faces turned suddenly
towards her told Joan that at some point in the thrilling history she
must unconsciously have laughed. Fortunately she was alone in the pew,