What Isaiah said concerning the stars and God’s “leading them forth” gave me some help, just when I was thinking about the “conflict between light and darkness.” For how, I thought, does God bring forth the stars except through the hand of His angel of darkness? Yet we, men, mostly speak of “darkness” as an enemy. And so, in a sense, it often is. Yet it is revealed in the aspect of a servant of God when besides bringing us the blessing of rest and sleep it leads forth the hosts of glories that (except for darkness) would never have been perceived. So, darkness brings God’s greatness to light. Paul certainly predicted that the same truth would hereafter be recognised about death and about the apparent disorder of Nature, and her “groanings and travailings”; and it seemed to me that he extended the same doctrine even to sin. The result was that I found myself content to accept—in a manner, and provisionally—what Paul said about “Satan” and about “principalities” and at the same time what he said to the effect that all things are from God and through God and to God, and, “For them that believe, all things work together for good.” In my judgment, it was better—yes, and more reasonable, in Paul’s sense of the word “reason”—to feel that I was in the Universe fighting a real fight against evil but looking up to God as my Helper, than to feel that there was no evil or enemy for me anywhere except in myself, and no friend either. So in the end I said, “Better to have been under the curse of death with Paul, if the curse may lead to a supreme blessing of life eternal in the presence of the Father, than to pass out of life with Epictetus, without any experience of curse at all, as so much earth, air, fire and water, into the nominal friendship of Gods and daemons!” In allowing myself thus to be led away by my new Jewish teacher I was not influenced by his letters alone, but by legends and traditions—to some of which he referred—in the Hebrew histories, visions, and prophecies. Some of these taught, predicted, prefigured, or suggested that, while man and the brute forces of man and nature blindly imagine that they are moving the wheel of the universe, God alone is really moving it, and is using them to move it, towards His own decreed and foreordained purpose.