And where shall we begin? Our predicament in this defence is something like that of the small boy, bewildered over the task of "picking up" his nursery. [p.030] "I can't do it," he says. "There are so many things; I can't tell which to take first." Poor little fellow! If he halts now, what will he do when the littered room--I had almost said the littered playroom--of his later life confronts him? Contradictions under foot everywhere are certainly not less confusing than blocks, horses, papers, trains, marbles, picture-books, and the like--or unlike--scattered over a nursery floor. Here, for example, in practical life is the natural, physical world. How real, brutally real, it is; its very law is fate; its forces are no respecters of persons, inexorably ruling and compelling all alike, giving life and taking it, full of the grimmest humour, raising hopes only to cast them down. Is some one rash enough to suggest that things physical are only so many ideas, real only as states of mind, of God's mind possibly, in some way coming to consciousness in the senses of men? The practical man knows a thing or two about that. He kicks a stone, or strikes his fist loudly upon a table, and so ends the matter, laughing the mad idealist away. And yet, prestissimo change! What do we hear him saying now? This brutally real world of physical things and powers is but a fleeting show; a thing only of space and time. What is really real and abiding is the spiritual that is everywhere and always. Another world there is, not to be spoken of in the same breath with this present world, a world compared with which this is but a mist before the eyes.