The scene stretched and stretched, and still Mr. Spalding kept before him every item as it had first appeared. He was now aware of the vast periods of geologic time. On the past side he saw the mammoth and the caveman; on the future he saw the Atlantic flooding the North Sea and submerging the flats of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent. He saw the giant tree-ferns; he saw the great saurians trampling the marshlands and sea-beaches of the past. A flight of fearful pterodactyls darkened the air. And he saw the ice creep down and down from the poles to the vast temperate zone of Europe, America and Australasia; he saw men and animals driven before it to the belt of the equator. And now he sank down deeper; he was swept into the stream that flowed, thudding and throbbing, through all live things; he felt it beat in and around him, jet after jet from the beating heart of God; he felt the rising of the sap in trees, the delight of animals at mating-time. He knew the joy that made Jerry, the black cat, dance on his hind legs and bow sideways and wave his forelegs like wings. The stars whirled past him with a noise like violin strings, and through it he heard the voice of Paul Jeffreson, singing a song. He was aware of an immense, all-pervading rapture pierced with stabs of pain. At the same time he was drawn back on the ebb of life into a curious peace. His stretch widened. He was present at the beginning and the end. He saw the earth flung off, an incandescent ball, from the wheeling sun. He saw it hang like a dead white moon in a sky strewn with the corpses of spent worlds. But to his surprise he saw no darkness. He learned that light is older than the suns; that they are born of it, not it of them. The whole universe stood up on end round him, doubling all its future back upon all its past. He saw the vast planes of time intersecting each other, like the planes of a sphere, wheeling, turning in and out of each other. He saw other space and time systems rising up, toppling, enclosing and enclosed. And as a tiny inset in the immense scene, his own life from birth to the present moment, together with the events of his heavenly life to come. In this vision Elizabeth’s adultery, which had once appeared so monstrous, so overpowering an event, was revealed as slender and insignificant. And now the universe dissolved into the ultimate constituents of matter, electrons of electrons of electrons, an unseen web, intensely vibrating, stretched through all space and all time. He saw it sucked back into the space of space, the time of time, into the thought of God. Mr. Spalding was drawn in with it. He passed from God’s immanent to his transcendent life, into the Absolute. For one moment he thought that this was death; the next his whole being swelled and went on swelling in an unspeakable, an unthinkable bliss.