It was like a Voice speaking—a Voice of inconceivable magnitude. It made one go cold, asking oneself the question: What if sin were an insult to Him? A scrap of filth flung in the Face of One who created the atom, the protoplasm, the cell, and the bacillus, and built from these in His own Image, Man. Sitting in the stilly duskiness the woman He had made shut her eyes and tried to envisage Him. He was not the God of the Curate’s Confirmation-class, nor the God the Anglican Vicar of the West End Church preached about, but a Being the hem of whose garment extends beyond the confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity. Infinite Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty, He could stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship so much, that for them He did not hesitate to sacrifice Himself in the Person of His Only Son. Did not love such as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that Son’s Person? Wasn’t it—pretty rough on Our Saviour—to have poured out His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement for the sins of men like dead von Herrnung, and women like Patrine Saxham, and know them still so beastly, so prurient, so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn upon Patrine, still possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood that dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black Cross behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully committed, opened its Wounds afresh. Drove the thorns anew into the drooping Head of the Crucified, pierced once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of love.... "_O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be any sorrow like unto My Sorrow._" The words came cropping up through layers of sentences heard and forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken them at her side. This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of horrors. You remember that at seven o’clock in the morning two German Army Corps had poured into Belgium by the eleven strategic railways that provided for The Day. The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge python-like columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed batteries of field artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege howitzers thundering behind their traction-engines, the miles of motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons, carts, and lorries, blotted out the familiar features of the landscape, as, preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of Field Flying Service aëroplanes reconnoitring three thousand feet overhead, the hosts of Germany rolled down towards the banks of the Meuse.