CHAPTER 4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.

CHAPTER 4.5. THE CONSOLATION OF FAILURE.

CHAPTER 4.6. THE LAST CONFESSION.



INTRODUCTION.

Recently I set myself to put down what I believe. I did this with no
idea of making a book, but at the suggestion of a friend and to interest
a number of friends with whom I was associated. We were all, we found,
extremely uncertain in our outlook upon life, about our religious
feelings and in our ideas of right and wrong. And yet we reckoned
ourselves people of the educated class and some of us talk and lecture
and write with considerable confidence. We thought it would be of very
great interest to ourselves and each other if we made some sort of frank
mutual confession. We arranged to hold a series of meetings in which
first one and then another explained the faith, so far as he understood
it, that was in him. We astonished ourselves and our hearers by the
irregular and fragmentary nature of the creeds we produced, clotted at
one point, inconsecutive at another, inconsistent and unconvincing to a
quite unexpected degree. It would not be difficult to caricature one of
those meetings; the lecturer floundering about with an air of exquisite
illumination, the audience attentive with an expression of thwarted
edification upon its various brows. For my own part I grew so interested
in planning my lecture and in joining up point and point, that my notes
soon outran the possibilities of the hour or so of meeting for which I
was preparing them. The meeting got only a few fragments of what I had