And so my business here is to express an utter disbelief (which I hope readers will bear in mind) that Mr. Trimblerigg’s deity was one about whom it is possible to entertain the larger hope, even in the faint degree suggested by Tennyson,--or that he was anything except a tribal survival to whom Mr. Trimblerigg and others gave names which did not properly belong to him. What finally laid Mr. Trimblerigg by the heels was the fact that having picked up this god as he went along (finding him favourable to the main chance) it was the main chance--idealized as ‘the larger hope’--which he really worshipped without knowing it. Upon the strength of that inspiration environment intoxicated him, and he drew his spiritual life from the atmosphere around him. Then he was like a bottle of seltzer, which at the first touch of the outer air begins almost explosively to expand; whereas, for the bulk of us, we unbottle to it like still wine without sound or foam, accepting it as the natural element for which we were born. To Mr. Trimblerigg, on the other hand, it came as a thing direct from God: at the first touch of the herd-instinct he bubbled, and felt himself divine. And in the rush of pentecostal tongues amid which he lost his head, he forgot that atmosphere and environment are but small local conditions, and that, outside these, vacuum and interstellar space hold the true balances of Heaven more surely and correctively than do the brief and shifting lives of men. This spiritual adventurer, with his alert vision so curiously reduced in scale to seize the opportunities of day and hour, missed the march of time from listening too acutely to the ticks of the clock. And if he offers us an example for our better learning, it is mainly as showing what belittling results the herd-instinct and tribal-deism may produce in a mercurial and magnetic temperament,--making him imagine himself something quite other from what he really is, and his god a person far removed from that category in which he has been placed. My own interpretation of this ‘Revelation,’ which has made me its involuntary mouthpiece, is that it shows the beginning--but the beginning only--of mental change in a god who has become tired of deceiving himself about the work of his creation; and that it has begun to dawn upon his mind--though he denies it in words--that, in making Mr. Trimblerigg, he has made another little mistake, and that his creation was really stuffed as full of them as a plum-pudding is stuffed with plums. And I have a hope that when tribal deity becomes properly apologetic for its many misshapings of a divided world, humanity will begin to come by its own, and acquire a theology which is not an organized hypocrisy for the bolstering up of nationalities and peoples.