spirit of man, as apart from aught that is gross in him. They are the
symbol of purity, of triumph over corruption. Water, air, earth, can
all harbour corruption; but where flames are, or have been, there is
innocence. Our love of fire comes partly, doubtless, from our natural
love of destruction for destruction's sake. Fire is savage, and so,
even after all these centuries, are we, at heart. Our civilisation is
but as the aforesaid crust that encloses the old planetary flames. To
destroy is still the strongest instinct of our nature. Nature is still
`red in tooth and claw,' though she has begun to make fine flourishes
with tooth-brush and nail-scissors. Even the mild dog on my hearth-rug
has been known to behave like a wolf to his own species. Scratch his
master and you will find the caveman. But the scratch must be a sharp
one: I am thickly veneered. Outwardly, I am as gentle as you, gentle
reader. And one reason for our delight in fire is that there is no
humbug about flames: they are frankly, primaevally savage. But this is
not, I am glad to say, the sole reason. We have a sense of good and
evil. I do not pretend that it carries us very far. It is but the
tooth-brush and nail-scissors that we flourish. Our innate instincts,
not this acquired sense, are what the world really hinges on. But this
acquired sense is an integral part of our minds. And we revere fire
because we have come to regard it as especially the foe of evil--as a
means for destroying weeds, not flowers; a destroyer of wicked cities,
not of good ones.

The idea of hell, as inculcated in the books given to me when I was a
child, never really frightened me at all. I conceived the possibility
of a hell in which were eternal flames to destroy every one who had
not been good. But a hell whose flames were eternally impotent to
destroy these people, a hell where evil was to go on writhing yet
thriving for ever and ever, seemed to me, even at that age, too