THEN again Kennaston stood in a stone-walled apartment, like a cell, wherein there was a furnace and much wreckage. A contemplative friar was regarding the disorder about him with disapproval, the while he sucked at two hurt fingers. “There can be no doubt that Old Legion conspires to hinder the great work,” he considered. “And what is the great work, father?” Kennaston asked him. “To find the secret of eternal life, my son. What else is lacking? Man approaches to God in all things save this, _Imaginis imago_, created after God’s image. But as yet, by reason of his mortality, man shudders in a world that is arrayed against him. Thus, the heavens threaten with winds and lightnings, with plague-breeding meteors and the unfriendly aspect of planets; the big seas molest with waves and inundations, stealthily drowning cities overnight, and sucking down tall navies as a child gulps sugarplums; whereas how many plants and gums and seeds bear man’s destruction in their tiny hearts! what soulless beasts of the field and of the wood are everywhere enleagued in endless feud against him, with tusks and teeth, with nails and claws and venomous stings, made sharp for man’s demolishment! Thus all struggle miserably, like hunted persons under a sentence of death that may at best be avoided for a little while. And manifestly, this is not as it should be.” “Yet I much fear it is so ordered, father.” The old man said testily: “I repeat, for your better comfort, there can be no doubt that Satan alone conspires to hinder the great work. No; it would be abuse of superstition to conceive, as would be possible for folk of slender courage, that the finger of heaven has to-day unloosed this destruction, to my bodily hurt and spiritual admonition.” Kennaston could see, though, that the speaker half believed this might be exactly what had happened. “For I am about no vaunting transgression of man’s estate; I do but seek to recover his lost heritage. You will say to me, it is written that never shall any man be one day old in the sight of God?—Yet it is likewise written that unto God a thousand years are but one day. For this period of time, then, may each man righteously demand that death delay to enact the midwife to his second birth. It advantages not to contend that even in the heyday of patriarchs few approached to such longevity; for Moses, relinquishing to silence all save the progeny of Seth, nowhere directly tells us that some of the seed of Cain did not outlive Methuselah. Yea, and our common parent, Adam, was created in the perfect age of man, which then fell not short of one hundred years, since at less antiquity did none of the antediluvian fathers beget issue, as did Adam in the same year breath was given him; and the years of Adam’s life were nine hundred and thirty; whereby it is a reasonable conceit of learned persons to compute him to have exceeded a thousand years in age, if not in duration of existence. Now, it is written that