Working together of an evening upon the plans for the new dwellings, Anthony and he would often break off to pursue the argument. Landripp would admit that his own religion failed to answer all his questions. But Anthony’s religion contented him still less. Why should a just God, to whom all things were possible, have made man a creature of “low intelligence and evil instincts,” leaving him to welter through the ages amid cruelty, blood and lust, instead of fashioning him from the beginning a fit and proper heir for the kingdom of eternity? That he might work out his own salvation! That a few scattered fortunates, less predisposed to evil than their fellows or possessed of greater powers of resistance, might struggle out of the mire--enter into their inheritance: the great bulk cursed from their birth, be left to sink into destruction. The Christ legend he found himself unable to accept. If true, then God was fallible, His omniscience a myth--a God who made mistakes and sought to rectify them. Even so, He had not succeeded. The number of true Christians--the number of those who sought to live according to Christ’s teaching were fewer today than under the reign of the Cæsars. During the Middle Ages the dying embers of Christianity had burnt up anew. Saint Francis had insisted upon the necessity of poverty, of love--had preached the brotherhood of all things living. Men and women in increasing numbers had for a brief period accepted Christ not as their scapegoat but as their leader. There had been men like Millsborough’s own Saint Aldys--a successful business man, as business was understood in his day--who on his conversion had offered to the service of God not ten per cent. of his booty but his whole life. Any successful business man of today who attempted to follow his example would be certified by the family doctor as fit candidate for the lunatic asylum. Two thousand years after Christ’s death one man, so far as knowledge went, the Russian writer Tolstoy, had made serious attempt to live the life commanded by Christ. And all Christendom stood staring at him in stupefied amazement. If Christ had been God’s scheme for the reformation of a race that He Himself had created prone to evil then it had tragically failed. Christianity, a feeble flame from the beginning, had died out, leaving the world darker, its last hope extinguished. They had been working long into the short June night. Landripp had drawn back the curtains and thrown open the window. There came from the east a faint pale dawn.