Yes, looking back, he saw he could not have done otherwise, though for that old voice of God in his heart he now substituted mentally the Hegelian concept of the Idea trying to realize itself through him, Shakespeare's "prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come." The Will of God was the Will of the Time-spirit, and what was True for the age was whatever its greatest spirits could demonstrate to it by reason and history. The world had had enough of merely dithyrambic prophets, it was for the Modern Prophet to heat with his fire the cannon-balls of logic and science; he must be a thinker among prophets and a prophet among thinkers. Those he could not inspire through emotion must be led through reason. There must be not one weak link in his close-meshed chain of propositions. And who could doubt that what the Time-spirit was working towards among the Germans--the Chosen People in the eternal plan of the universe for this new step in human evolution--was the foundation of a true Kingdom of right, a Kingdom of freedom and equality, a State which should stand for justice on earth, and material and spiritual blessedness for all? But his father had complained not unjustly. Why should _he_ have been chosen for the Man--the Martyr--through whom the Idea sought self-realization? It was a terrible fate to be Moses, to be Prometheus. No doubt that image of himself he read in the faces of his friends, and in the loving eyes of the Countess Hatzfeldt--that glorious wonder-youth gifted equally with genius and beauty--must seem enviable enough, yet to his own heart how chill was this lonely greatness. And youth itself was passing--was almost gone. IV