to hurt your adversary.  No, I am inclined to think that the only thing which is wasteful is anything which suspends interest and animation and the love of life; and I don’t blame idle and extravagant people who live with zest and liveliness for doing that.  I only blame them for not seeing that their extravagance is keeping people at the other end of the scale in drudgery and dulness.  Of course the difficulty of it is, that if we offered the lowest stratum of workers a great increase of leisure, they would largely misuse it; and that is why I believe that in the future a large part of the education of workers will be devoted to teaching them how to employ their leisure agreeably and not noxiously.  And I believe that there are thousands of cases in the world which are infinitely worse than the case of Keats—­who, after all, had more joy of the finest quality in his short life than most of us achieve.  I mean the cases of men and women with fine and sensitive instincts, who by being born under base and down-trodden conditions are never able to get a taste of clean, wholesome, and beautiful life at all—­that’s a much darker problem.”

“But how do you fit that into your theories of life at all?” said Vincent.

“Oh, it fits my theory of life well enough,” said Father Payne.  “You see, I believe it to be a real battle, and not a sham fight.  I believe in God as the source of all the fine, beautiful, and free instincts, casting them lavishly into the world, against a horribly powerful and relentless but ultimately stupid foe.  ‘Who put the evil there?’ you may say, ’and how did it get there first?’ Ah, I don’t know that—­that is the origin of evil.  But I don’t believe that God put it there first, just for the interest of the fight.  I don’t believe that He is responsible for waste—­I think it is one of the forces He is fighting.  He pushes battalion after battalion to the assault, and down they go.  It’s cruel work, but it isn’t anything like so cruel as to suppose that He arranged it all or even permitted it all.  That would indeed sicken and dishearten me.  No, I believe that God never wastes anything; but it’s a fearful and protracted battle; and I believe that He will win in the end.  I read a case in the paper the other day of a little child in a workhouse that had learnt a lot of infamous language, and cursed and swore if it was given milk instead of beer or brandy.  Am I to believe that God was in any way responsible for putting a little child in that position?—­for allowing things to take shape so, if He could have checked it?  No, indeed!  I do not believe in a God as helpless or as wicked as that!  There is something devilish there, for which He is not responsible, and against which He is fighting as hard as He can.”

“But doesn’t heredity come in there?” said Vincent.  “It isn’t the child’s fault, and probably no amount of decent conditions would turn that child into anything respectable.”