In such religious aestheticisms the soul of John Norton had long slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he overstepped the line ruled by the Church, was repulsed. From him John Norton's faith had suffered nothing; the severest and most violent shocks had come from another side--a side which none would guess, so complex and contradictory are the involutions of the human brain. Hellenism, Greek culture and ideal; academic groves; young disciples, Plato and Socrates, the august nakedness of the Gods were equal, or almost equal, in his mind with the lacerated bodies of meagre saints; and his heart wavered between the temple of simple lines and the cathedral of a thousand arches. Once there had been a sharp struggle, but Christ, not Apollo, had been the victor, and the great cross in the bedroom of Stanton College overshadowed the beautiful slim body in which Divinity seemed to circulate like blood; and this photograph was all that now remained of much youthful anguish and much temptation. A fact to note is that his sense of reality had always remained in a rudimentary state; it was, as it were, diffused over the world and mankind. For instance, his belief in the misery and degradation of earthly life, and the natural bestiality of man, was incurable; but of this or that individual he had no opinion; he was to John Norton a blank sheet of paper, to which he could not affix even a title. His childhood had been one of tumult and sorrow; the different and dissident ideals growing up in his heart and striving for the mastery, had torn and tortured him, and he had long lain as upon a mental rack. Ignorance of the material laws of existence had extended even into his sixteenth year, and when, bit by bit, the veil fell, and he understood, he was filled with loathing of life and mad desire to wash himself free of its stain; and it was this very hatred of natural flesh that had precipitated a perilous worship of deified flesh. But the Gothic cathedral had intervened; he had been taken by the beauty of its architecture and the beauty of its Gregorian chant. But now he realised--if not in all its truth, at least in part--that his love of God had only taken the form of a gratification of the senses, a sensuality higher but as intense as those which he so much reproved. His life had been but a sin, an abomination. And as a woman rising from a bed of small-pox shrinks from destroying the fair remembrance of her face by pursuing the traces of the disease through every feature, he hid his face in his hands and called for forgiveness--for escape from the endless record of his conscience. He saw the Hell