reality.  And it was Hugh, Hugh that he had thought was dead, it was young Heinrich living also, it was himself, it was those others that sought, it was all these and it was more, it was the Master, the Captain of Mankind, it was God, there present with him, and he knew that it was God.  It was as if he had been groping all this time in the darkness, thinking himself alone amidst rocks and pitfalls and pitiless things, and suddenly a hand, a firm strong hand, had touched his own.  And a voice within him bade him be of good courage.  There was no magic trickery in that moment; he was still weak and weary, a discouraged rhetorician, a good intention ill-equipped; but he was no longer lonely and wretched, no longer in the same world with despair.  God was beside him and within him and about him....  It was the crucial moment of Mr. Britling’s life.  It was a thing as light as the passing of a cloud on an April morning; it was a thing as great as the first day of creation.  For some moments he still sat back with his chin upon his chest and his hands dropping from the arms of his chair.  Then he sat up and drew a deep breath....

This had come almost as a matter of course.

For weeks his mind had been playing about this idea.  He had talked to Letty of this Finite God, who is the king of man’s adventure in space and time.  But hitherto God had been for him a thing of the intelligence, a theory, a report, something told about but not realised....  Mr. Britling’s thinking about God hitherto had been like some one who has found an empty house, very beautiful and pleasant, full of the promise of a fine personality.  And then as the discoverer makes his lonely, curious explorations, he hears downstairs, dear and friendly, the voice of the Master coming in....

There was no need to despair because he himself was one of the feeble folk.  God was with him indeed, and he was with God.  The King was coming to his own.  Amidst the darknesses and confusions, the nightmare cruelties and the hideous stupidities of the great war, God, the Captain of the World Republic, fought his way to empire.  So long as one did one’s best and utmost in a cause so mighty, did it matter though the thing one did was little and poor?

“I have thought too much of myself,” said Mr. Britling, “and of what I would do by myself.  I have forgotten that which was with me....”

Section 10

He turned over the rest of the night’s writing presently, and read it now as though it was the work of another man.

These later notes were fragmentary, and written in a sprawling hand.

    "Let us make ourselves watchers and guardians of the order of the
    world....

    "If only for love of our dead....