PERADVENTURE OR THE SILENCE OF GOD BY ROBERT KEABLE "He is a god; peradventure he sleepeth"--1 _Kings xviii._ 27 CONSTABLE & CO LTD LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY First published, 1922 _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ THE MOTHER OF ALL LIVING A CITY OF THE DAWN SIMON CALLED PETER PILGRIM PAPERS STANDING BY _ETC._ DEDICATION _MY DEAR CHRISTOPHER,_ _Recently a very eminent Anglican divine gave us a book which he said embodied "forty years of profound thought." In it he deals to no small extent with the subject of this novel, a novel which, though hiddenly, I wish to dedicate to you._ _I want to do so because, perhaps, you alone of all my friends will know how much herein written down is true to the life we both led and both have left. It is odd, I think, as I look back, how little we have seen of each other, and how much: how little, because great tracts of your life and mine have been traversed wholly apart, and we only met, in the beginning, when we had both of us come some distance along the way; but how much, since each time we met and walked a mile or two together, we talked very freely and we found we understood. Now, as like as not, I shall see increasingly less of you, seeing that you have become a Catholic, a religious, and a priest at that. It is little one knows of life and its surprises, but we have shaken hands at the cross-roads anyway. A moment, then, ere you go up the steep hill ahead of you, and a moment ere I take my own road that has I cannot see what level or uphill or down in it,--a moment ere you put my book in your pocket for the sake of the days gone by._ _You will appreciate the fact that I should have put my thought into a novel and not into a book of serious theology. Man's thoughts about God are read best in a novel. Yes, on the one hand, they are best set in a transitory frivolous form that booksellers will expose on their stalls labelled with one of those neatly-printed little tickets--you know: "Just the Book for a Long Journey"--to catch the attention of a man off for his holiday or a girl bored with having to return. Yes, they are best set where they can be read in a few hours by the drawing-room fire. For, after all, ten years or forty or four hundred of man's profound thought about God is worth, maybe a little more than the price of a pound of chocolates, maybe a little less than that of a theatre seat. Besides the novel has a coloured wrapper, and they are not yet brave enough or sufficiently wise to wrap up theology in that form._