This does not mean that Peter was the sole possessor of those truths. He was only one among millions of simple and unsophisticated souls, all over the world, who possessed those truths dumbly, and knew, with complete certainty, that their intellectual leaders, for the most part, lacked them, or had lost them in a multitude of details. These dumb millions were right about certain important matters; and their leaders, for all their dialectical cleverness, had lost sight of the truth which has always proceeded _ex ore infantium_. It was the tragedy of the twentieth century, and it had culminated in the tragedy of philosophical Germany. There were certain features of modern books, modern paintings, and modern music, that mopped and mowed like faces through the bars of a mad-house, clamoring for dishonor and brutality in every department of life. These things could not be dissociated from the international tragedy. They were its heralds. Peter Ramsay was one of those obscure millions who were the most important figures in Armageddon because they, and they alone, in our modern world, had retained the right to challenge the sophistries of Germany. They had not needed the war to teach them the reality of evil; and if they had sinned, they had never for a moment tried to prove that they did right in sinning. Peter knew all this, though he would not have said it in so many words. In his book, he was trying to meet the main onset of all those destructive forces. He had realized that the modern world had no faith, since the creeds had gone into the melting pot; and he was trying to write down, plainly, for plain men, exactly what he believed. He turned over the red-lined pages of the big leather-bound ledger, half diary, half commonplace book, in which, for the last forty years, he had made his notes. It was a queer medley, beginning with passages written in his youth, that recalled many of his old struggles. There was one, in particular, that always reminded him of a school friend named Herbert Potts, who had eventually won the coveted scholarship. They used to go for walks together, over the hills, and talk about science and religion. "So you don't believe there is any future life," Peter had said to him one day. "Not for the individual," replied Herbert Potts, adjusting his glasses, with a singularly intellectual expression. "But if there is none for the individual, it means the end of all we are fighting for, because the race will come to an end, eventually," said Peter. "Why, think, Potts, think, it means that all your progress drops over a precipice at last. It means that instead of the Figure of Love, we must substitute the Figure of Death, stretching out his arms and saying to the whole human race, 'Come unto _Me_! Suffer little children to come unto _Me_!'"