Then he continued his gentle attack on my unbelief. "My friend," he said, "you yourself have already seen that without Christ the universe is unintelligible and unendurably horrible. You are now beginning to see that through Christ a meaning springs to the eye. All the evil of the world, which so dismayed you when I first saw you, turns out to be for our own good, to chasten us, to waken us to the spirit; that we may all at last blissfully live the life of the spirit in eternity." Again he watched me in silent expectation.

*****

I did not answer. Avoiding his gaze, I looked across the close. The rain was now hissing on the flagstones, each drop a bullet with splashing impact. A yellow butterfly, shot down by the first volley, feebly struggled on the wet ground, its wings muddy. From within, since the short service was over, the worshippers were issuing one by one; a few dim women, an elderly man, and also, rather self-consciously, a soldier. Each glanced upward, frowning at the deluge. Some put up umbrellas and hurried away; some waited in the porch to shelter. Newcomers to the cathedral stamped their feet and shook the water from their clothing.

I did not answer, because I was desperately perplexed. How intelligible, how humane and friendly, the Christian's account of the ancient faith now seemed to me! I thought of you. How humanly right it seemed that you should be yourself in eternity; purged, no doubt, transfigured; but essentially and recognizably yourself, the unique particular being whose life I share! And how right that I, purged almost beyond recognition, should be with you eternally! The annihilation of our union did indeed seem to make nonsense of the universe.

Yes, and this loving, this spirit that holds us together and raises each of us to a higher level of awareness in relation to the whole universe--could I deny, had I any need to deny, that in some sense it was divine? This spirit, that so quickened us, must surely be the quickening spirit of the whole universe, and the only way of universal fulfilment. And had I not at least seen that this spirit of love, if it is indeed divine, must in some way be personified in a supreme individual, who out of charity needs must bear all the sins of the world, needs must suffer in his own heart all the evil of all the worlds? And had I not, under this Christian's influence, felt at last that Jesus was in fact this perfect embodiment of the divine love?

And so, and so ...But on the very brink of the abyss, vertigo seized me, and a will to surrender to the gulf of this salvation.

The little spider had by now climbed back along his rope and had strung another from the statue's nose to its chin, and from chin to breast, laboriously constructing the framework for its web. The Christian, following the direction of my gaze, saw the silken threads and their minute author. With a careless hand he swept the threads from the statue's face and blew the spider from his fingers.

Suddenly I knew that to demand eternal life for the individual, even for the beloved, even for you, was childish, and a betrayal. Love was indeed the way of life; and maybe in so dark a sense, which is at present inconceivable, it presides in the very heart of the universe; but to pledge oneself to this belief would nevertheless be for me a grave betrayal of spiritual integrity. Calmly, and without dismay, even with unreasoning joy, I reminded myself that you and I, loved and loving, might well in fact be short-lived sparkles, merely, in an age-old pyrotechnic. The vastness of the physical confronted me, the boundless void and the astronomical aeons; before man; before the planets congealed; before the oldest of the stars first spangled the nebulae; before the unnumbered host of the nebulae themselves condensed from the expanding cloud of the young cosmos; back to the initial and inscrutable creative act, the atom bomb from which all sprang.

Hugeness is in itself nothing, but it has significance. For if this little world of ours, this grain, can in its lowly way harbour the spirit, what of the whole? The hugeness of space and time did not dismay me. I accepted it with grave joy, awed less by its threat than by pregnancy.

And so, our little loving is indeed hesitantly significant; if not of the inscrutable heart of all things, at least of the splendour that the cosmos may support in countless worlds, happy and tragic.

And now I saw once more quite clearly that what matters, what finally claims allegiance is not the individual nor even mankind, but something else, which all of us together, on earth and in all worlds, imperfectly manifest. This something, I told myself, this spirit, is indeed the music of the spheres, for which we are all lowly instruments and players. Whether this music is only to be appreciated gropingly by the players themselves, or whether it is for the discerning joy of some cosmical artist, or perhaps in some incomprehensible way for the very music itself, we cannot know. Perhaps it is for nothing. On that high plane thought is impotent.

Then you and I? If the end is sleep, all's well. For we have lived. Or if in death we do indeed wake into some ampler life, to contribute further to the music, then again all's well. If we live on, it is for the music; if we die, equally it is for the music.

The rain had stopped. The trees heavily dripped. Sunshine drew from the moist ground vapours and fragrances.