Presently he reached a spot where the road cut through some woodland. Dark pine trees waved their branches to the skies. In the near distance the heath stretched away for miles, and although it was piercingly cold, the scene was almost attractive. But here it was dark, gloomy, forbidding. For some time he stood looking at the waving pine trees; it might have been that he saw more than was plainly visible.
"What fools, what blind fools men are!" he said aloud. "Their lives are bounded by what they see, and they laugh at the spiritual world; they scorn the suggestion that belting the earth are untold millions of spirits of the dead. Here they are all around me. I can see them. I can see them!"
His eyes burnt red; his features were contorted as if by pain.
"An eternal struggle," he cried—"just an eternal struggle between right and wrong, good and evil—yes, good and evil!
"And the good is slowly gaining the victory! Out of all the wild, mad convulsions of the world, right is slowly emerging triumphant, the savage is being subdued, and the human, the Divine, is triumphing."
He lifted his right hand, and shook his fist to the heavens as if defiantly.
"I had great hopes of the War," he went on. "I saw hell let loose; I saw the world mad for blood. Everywhere was the lust for blood; everywhere men cried, 'Kill! kill!' And now it is over, and wrong is being defeated—defeated!"
He seemed to be in a mad frenzy, his voice shook with rage.
"Dark spirits of hell!" he cried. "You have been beaten, beaten! Why, even in this ghastly war, the Cross has been triumphant! Those thousands, those millions of men who went out from this land, went out for an ideal. They did not understand it, but it was so. They felt dimly and indistinctly that they were fighting, dying, that others might live! And some of the most heroic deeds ever known in the history of the world were done. Men died for others, died for comradeship, died for duty, died for country. Everywhere the Cross was seen!
"And those fellows are not dead! They are alive! they have entered into a greater life!