of the abyss; he was on the side of arrogance and mystery,
and contempt of all obvious good. Between this sunken pride
and the towering humilities of heaven there are, one must suppose,
spirits of shapes and sizes. Man, in encountering them,
must make much the same mistakes that he makes in encountering
any other varied types in any other distant continent. It must
be hard at first to know who is supreme and who is subordinate.
If a shade arose from the under world, and stared at Piccadilly,
that shade would not quite understand the idea of an ordinary
closed carriage. He would suppose that the coachman on the box
was a triumphant conqueror, dragging behind him a kicking and
imprisoned captive. So, if we see spiritual facts for the first time,
we may mistake who is uppermost. It is not enough to find the gods;
they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods.
We must have a long historic experience in supernatural phenomena--
in order to discover which are really natural. In this light I
find the history of Christianity, and even of its Hebrew origins,
quite practical and clear. It does not trouble me to be told
that the Hebrew god was one among many. I know he was, without any
research to tell me so. Jehovah and Baal looked equally important,
just as the sun and the moon looked the same size. It is only
slowly that we learn that the sun is immeasurably our master,
and the small moon only our satellite. Believing that there
is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world
of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good.
Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at
the North Pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the
land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water,
and comforting like fire; until I find some place in eternity,
where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to