Sir Eliphaz sounded dissent musically. Then he waved his long hand as Mr. Huss paused and regarded him. “But go on!” he said. “Go on!”
“And now I come to you, Dr. Barrack, and your modern fatalism. You hold this universe is uncontrollable—anyhow. And incomprehensible. For good or ill—we can be no more than our strenuous selves. You must, you say, _be yourself_. I answer, you must lose yourself in something altogether greater—in God.... There is a curious likeness, Doctor, and a curious difference in your views and mine. I think you see the world very much as I see it, but you see it coldly like a man before sunrise, and I—”
He paused. “There is a light upon it,” he asserted with a noticeable flatness in his voice. “There is a light ... light....”
He became silent. For a while it seemed as if the light he spoke of had gone from him and as if the shadow had engulfed him. When he spoke again it was with an evident effort.
He turned to Dr. Barrack. “You think,” he said, “that there is a will in this Process of yours which will take things somewhere, somewhere definitely greater or better or onward. I hold that there is no will at all except in and through ourselves. If there be any will at all ... I hold that even your maxim ‘be ourselves’ is a paradox, for we cannot be ourselves until we have lost ourselves in God. I have talked to Sir Eliphaz and to you since you came in, of the boundless disorder and evil of nature. Let me talk to you now of the boundless miseries that arise from the disorderliness of men and that must continue age after age until either men are united in spirit and in truth or destroyed through their own incoherence. Whether men will be lost or saved I do not know. There have been times when I was sure that God would triumph in us.... But dark shadows have fallen upon my spirit....