For here we have a world full of mistakes, which is governed, according to the theologians, by a God who makes none. And what between predestination and free-will, and grace abounding mixed up with original sin, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy at such universal dash throughout the world that not one honest soul in a million has an even chance of being really right,--when that is the spectacle presented to us in the life of the human race, it becomes something of a mockery to minds of intelligence to be told that their gods have never made mistakes. Those who have been blessed with good parents, do not like them less because of certain failings and limitations which go to the shaping of their characters; and when, arrived at the age of discretion, they have to withstand their failings and recognize their limitations, they do so with a certain amount of deference and with undiminished affection; but they do not, if they are wise, or if they have the well-being of their parents really at heart,--they do not let it be thought that they regard them either as immaculate or infallible. I have come to the conclusion that a like duty towards its tribal deities belongs to the human race; and that man has made many mistakes simply by regarding these tribal emanations as immune from error, all-seeing, all-wise, all-loving--which they certainly are not. And I believe that Mr. Trimblerigg would have been a very much better and more useful man if he could have conceived his tribal deity as one liable to error like himself. The terrible Nemesis which seized the soul of Mr. Trimblerigg and hurled it to destruction was a very limited and one-sided conception of what was good and right, embodied in the form of a personal deity who could do no wrong. So here, as I read it, we have the revelation of the detriment done to a human soul by an embodied belief in itself under cover of a religious creed. And the record of that process has been handed over to me, I suppose, because the tribal deity responsible for the results has got a little tired of the abject flattery of his worshippers, and a little doubtful whether that relation between the human and the divine is really the right one. He is suffering in fact, as I read him, from a slight attack of creative indigestion, and is anxious to get rid of certain by-products which his system cannot properly assimilate: he is anxious, amongst other things, to get rid of responsibility for Mr. Trimblerigg. But the responsibility is there; and I allow myself this foreword in order to declare it in spite of the things which hereafter I am made to say. ‘You cannot unscramble eggs,’ is a dictum as applicable to gods as to mortals. And if people would remember that in their prayers, prayers would be less foolish and fatuous than they often are.