CHAPTER XV

THE CRUCIBLE


I

For better or worse John Hodder had flung his treasured beliefs into the
crucible, and one by one he watched them crumble and consume away. None
but his own soul knew what it cost him to make the test; and some times,
in the early stages of it, he would cast down his book under the lamp and
walk for hours in the night. Curiosity, and the despair of one who is
lost impelled him to persist.

It had been said of him that he had a talent for the law, and he now
discovered that his mind, once freed, weighed the evidence with a
pitiless logic, paid its own tribute--despite the anguish of the heart
--to the pioneers of truth whose trail it followed into the Unknown, who
had held no Mystery more sacred than Truth itself, who had dared to
venture into the nothingness between the whirling worlds.

He considered them, those whirling worlds, at night. Once they had been
the candles of Jehovah, to light the path of his chosen nation, to herald
the birth of his Son. And now? How many billions of blind, struggling
creatures clung to them? Where now was this pin-point of humanity, in
the midst of an appalling spectacle of a grinding, remorseless nature?

And that obscure Event on which he had staked his hopes? Was He, as John