_But on the other hand, my dear Chris, there is no form of writing yet devised quite so true or quite so profound as the novel of human affairs may well be. For, Incarnation or no Incarnation, beyond doubt you cannot separate man and God. We have no medium other than the human brain by which to think of Him, however illumined or deluded that brain may be, and no other measure of His Person than that of human life. Your abstract theologian may decide that He is or is not a Father: it is man's striving soul that knows; and against their presumptive reasoning of the spiritual heaven, I would set half a dozen pages torn from earth._ _You will be well aware as you read that these chapters are such pages truly enough. I do not mean that it is not the stuff of fiction that is here, but I do protest that Claxted and Keswick and Port o' Man and Thurloe End and Fordham, yes, and Zanzibar, are true to type, though many readers will scarcely believe me. I can see the critics mocking though the ink is not yet dry upon the page. And if, by chance, one of them should catch a fleeting glimpse of his own face in the glass, he will assuredly throw it up at me that the mirror is distorted. Yet, as Samuel Butler says: "If a bona fide writer thinks a thing wants saying ... the question whether it will do him personally good or harm, or how it will affect this or that friend, never enters his head, or if it does, it is instantly ordered out again."_ _Allow me then, for this reason, your name within the boards. You will know, however much you disapprove, that there is no malice here. For what would I gain by mockery, old friend, who have already lost friends enough by speaking the truth? It is a pitiable dance this of ours around the altar of Baal, over which, if God be too divine, at least man should be human enough rather to weep than to mock. Yet I believe, as indeed I have written, that sorrow in the human story is but the shadow of a lovelier thing; that the grass grows green, that the flower blows red, that in the wide sea also are things creeping innumerable both small and great beasts, and that every one is good. And God's in His Heaven? Peradventure. At least His Veil is fair._ _But--and it is a big "but"--for you in your high vocation and for me in this of mine, for each of us, oddly enough, in his own way, there is a verse from Miss V. H. Friedlaender's_ A Friendship _which I find I cannot easily forget:_ _When we are grown We know it is for us To rend the flowery lies from worlds Foul with hypocrisy; To perish stoned and blinded in the desert-- That men unborn may see._ _And I want to set that down too, before a reader turns a page._ _Ever yours, ROBERT KEABLE._ CONTENTS CHAPTER DEDICATION I. LAMBETH COURT II. CAMBRIDGE III. CHRISTMAS CAROLS IV. FATHER VASSALL V. VACATION VI. MOUNT CARMEL VII. THURLOE END VIII. JUDGMENTS IX. FORDHAM X. "THE BLIND BEGGAR" XI. URSULA XII. ZANZIBAR