But with this analysis of what may be called the intellectual presuppositions of _Robert Elsmere_, my mind began to turn to what I believed to be the other side of the Greenian or Modernist message--i.e., that life itself, the ordinary human life and experience of every day as it has been slowly evolved through history, is the true source of religion, if man will but listen to the message in his own soul, to the voice of the Eternal Friend, speaking through Conscience, through Society, through Nature. Hence _David Grieve_, which was already in my mind within a few months of the publication of _Robert Elsmere_. We were at Borough Farm when the vision of it first came upon me. It was a summer evening of extraordinary beauty, and I had been wandering through the heather and the pine woods. "The country"--to quote an account written some years ago--"was drenched in sunset; white towering thunder-clouds descending upon and mingling with the crimson of the heath, the green stretches of bracken, the brown pools upon the common, everywhere a rosy suffusion, a majesty of light interweaving heaven and earth and transfiguring all dear familiar things--the old farm-house, the sand-pit where the children played and the sand-martins nested, the wood-pile by the farm door, the phloxes in the tumble-down farm-yard, the cottage down the lane." After months of rest, the fount of mental energy which had been exhausted in me the year before had filled again. I was eager to be at work, and this time on something "more hopeful, positive, and consoling" than the subject of the earlier book.