us, and of another who is above and outside and in and beneath all things, inaccessible and incomprehensible.  All these religions are trying to tell something they do not clearly know—­of a relationship between these two, that eludes them, that eludes the human mind, as water escapes from the hand.  It is unity and opposition they have to declare at the same time; it is agreement and propitiation, it is infinity and effort.”

“And the truth?” said the bishop in an eager whisper.  “You can tell me the truth.”

The Angel’s answer was a gross familiarity.  He thrust his hand through the bishop’s hair and ruffled it affectionately, and rested for a moment holding the bishop’s cranium in his great palm.

“But can this hold it?” he said....

“Not with this little box of brains,” said the Angel.  “You could as soon make a meal of the stars and pack them into your belly.  You haven’t the things to do it with inside this.”

He gave the bishop’s head a little shake and relinquished it.

He began to argue as an elder brother might.

“Isn’t it enough for you to know something of the God that comes down to the human scale, who has been born on your planet and arisen out of Man, who is Man and God, your leader?  He’s more than enough to fill your mind and use up every faculty of your being.  He is courage, he is adventure, he is the King, he fights for you and with you against death....”

“And he is not infinite?  He is not the Creator?” asked the bishop.

“So far as you are concerned, no,” said the Angel.

“So far as I am concerned?”

“What have you to do with creation?”

And at that question it seemed that a great hand swept carelessly across the blackness of the farther sky, and smeared it with stars and suns and shining nebulas as a brush might smear dry paint across a canvas.

The bishop stared in front of him.  Then slowly he bowed his head, and covered his face with his hands.

“And I have been in orders,” he murmured; “I have been teaching people the only orthodox and perfect truth about these things for seven and twenty years.”

And suddenly he was back in his gaiters and his apron and his shovel hat, a little black figure exceedingly small in a very great space....

(10)

It was a very great space indeed because it was all space, and the roof was the ebony of limitless space from which the stars swung flaming, held by invisible ties, and the soil beneath his feet was a dust of atoms and the little beginnings of life.  And long before the bishop bared his face again, he knew that he was to see his God.

He looked up slowly, fearing to be dazzled.