The command, the prohibition, had suddenly a new significance. Was this, then, the purport of a legend hitherto meaningless? Was this the truth behind the childish symbol? The deadly truth that knowledge is power of destruction—power of destruction too great for the human, the fallible, to wield?... Odd that he had never thought of it before—that, familiar all his life with a deadly truth, he had read it as primitive childishness! “Of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat ... lest ye die....” He sat numbly repeating the words half aloud till there flashed into his brain a memory, a vision of Markham. In his room off Great Smith Street on the night when war was declared—talking rapidly with his mouth full of biscuit. “Only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have been strangled at birth.... If the human animal must fight, it should kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the race of ’em!”... What was that but a paraphrase, a modern application of the command laid upon Adam. “Of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat ... lest ye die.” To his first impulse—of amazement and shrinking, as from treason—succeeded understanding of the outlook of these men and their decision. More, he wondered why, even in the worst of his despair, he had always believed in the persistence, the re-birth, of the civilization that had bred him.... These people—he saw it—were logical, as Markham had been logical—were wise after the event as Markham had been wise before it; and it amazed him that in his porings and guessings at a world reviving he had never hit upon their simple solution of the eternal problem of war. Markham’s solution; which, till this moment, he had not taken literally.... “You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of war; in the end it’s one or the other. We, I think, are going to prove that—very definitely.” One or the other. The fighting instinct or knowledge! Man, because he fights, must deny himself knowledge—which is power over the forces of nature; the secrets of nature must be veiled from him by his own ignorance—lest, when the impulse to strife wells up in him, they serve him for infinite destruction. These renegades, in agony, had made confession of their sin, of the corporate sin of a world; had faced the brutality of their own nature; had denied themselves the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and led themselves out of temptation. Since fight they must, being men with men’s passions, they would limit their powers of destruction.... So he read their strange self-denying ordinance.