He paused.  “Tell me,” said the friend at his side; “tell me.”

“It was as if a child running beside its mother, looked up and saw that he had never seen her face before, that she was not his mother, and that the words he had seemed to understand were—­now that he listened—­words in an unknown tongue.

“You see, I am but a common sort of man, dear God; I have neither lived nor thought in any way greatly, I have gone from one day to the next day without looking very much farther than the end of the day, I have gone on as life has befallen; if no great trouble had come into my life, so I should have lived to the end of my days.  But life which began for me easily and safely has become constantly more difficult and strange.  I could have held my services and given my benedictions, I could have believed I believed in what I thought I believed....  But now I am lost and astray—­crying out for God....”

(9)

“Let us talk a little about your troubles,” said the Angel.  “Let us talk about God and this creed that worries you and this church of yours.”

“I feel as though I had been struggling to this talk through all the years—­since my doubts began.”

“The story your Creed is trying to tell is much the same story that all religions try to tell.  In your heart there is God, beyond the stars there is God.  Is it the same God?”

“I don’t know,” said the bishop.

“Does any one know?”

“I thought I knew.”

“Your creed is full of Levantine phrases and images, full of the patched contradictions of the human intelligence utterly puzzled.  It is about those two Gods, the God beyond the stars and the God in your heart.  It says that they are the same God, but different.  It says that they have existed together for all time, and that one is the Son of the other.  It has added a third Person—­but we won’t go into that.”

The bishop was reminded suddenly of the dispute at Mrs. Garstein Fellows’.  “We won’t go into that,” he agreed.  “No!”

“Other religions have told the story in a different way.  The Cathars and Gnostics did.  They said that the God in your heart is a rebel against the God beyond the stars, that the Christ in your heart is like Prometheus—­or Hiawatha—­or any other of the sacrificial gods, a rebel.  He arises out of man.  He rebels against that high God of the stars and crystals and poisons and monsters and of the dead emptiness of space....  The Manicheans and the Persians made out our God to be fighting eternally against that Being of silence and darkness beyond the stars.  The Buddhists made the Lord Buddha the leader of men out of the futility and confusion of material existence to the great peace beyond.  But it is all one story really, the story of the two essential Beings, always the same story and the same perplexity cropping up under different names, the story of one being who stirs us, calls to us, and leads