had written, the First Born of the Universe, the Word Incarnate of a
system that defied time and space, the Logos of an outworn philosophy?
Was that Universe conscious, as Berkeley had declared, or the blind
monster of substance alone, or energy, as some modern scientists brutally
and triumphantly maintained? Where was the Spirit that breathed in it of
hope?

Such were some of the questions that thronged for solution. What was
mind, what spirit? an attenuated vapour of the all-pervading substance?

He could not permit himself to dwell on these thoughts--madness lay that
way. Madness, and a watching demon that whispered of substance, and
sought to guide his wanderings in the night. Hodder clung to the shell
of reality, to the tiny panorama of the visible and the finite, to the
infinitesimal gropings that lay recorded before him on the printed page.
Let him examine these first, let him discover--despite the price--what
warrant the mind of man (the only light now vouchsafed to him in his
darkness) gave him to speculate and to hope concerning the existence
of a higher, truer Reality than that which now tossed and wounded him.
It were better to know.

Scarcely had the body been lifted from the tree than the disputes
commenced, the adulterations crept in. The spontaneity, the fire and
zeal of the self-sacrificing itinerant preachers gave place to the
paralyzing logic then pervading the Roman Empire, and which had sent its
curse down the ages to the modern sermon; the geometrical rules of Euclid
were made to solve the secrets of the universe. The simple faith of the
cross which had inspired the martyr along the bloody way from Ephesus to
the Circus at Rome was formalized by degrees into philosophy: the faith
of future ages was settled by compromises, by manipulation, by bribery in