“I’m not talking about Christians. We’re a bad lot, most of us, but it’s because we don’t live up to our principles. You read over your Gospels, old boy, and tell me whether, if they really and vitally influenced the lives of the majority of Americans, Socialism in its essence—that is, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—would not follow as a matter of course.”
“Oh! perhaps, yes. I don’t quarrel with your religion as a system of morality, Clare. It is”—
“I know; miracles. But how a fellow who, not content with making bricks without straw, tries to build a house by tearing up the foundations, can quarrel with miracles, passes my comprehension. Look here. Do you not know that it is a waste of time to reform society from the outside, and especially by main force? The worm at the root of the social tree, my dear fellow, is sin. How do you propose to get rid of it?”
“Ah, there indeed,” sighed the German, his metaphysical soul rising to the bait, “you start the great religious problem, my friend, with which Zoroaster, Buddha, and other religious teachers have grappled.”
“And which only Christ has solved,” said Ernest Clare.
Whereupon they rushed into a discussion which, taking by and by another turn, led them into transcendental mathematics, and the possible existence of worlds or universes where a fourth dimension forms part of the usual order of things; with many wild fancies as to the type of inhabitants such universes may possess. When Karl hurried back from the other end of the car to fetch his wife and change cars for Micklegard, they were still hard at it.
That night Dora had a singular dream. She stood in a world which formed part of one of those universes of which Clare and his companion had spoken; a universe which admits a fourth, even perhaps a fifth, dimension, and which must therefore differ so widely from our earth even in the primary elements that compose what here we call land and water, that any attempt to describe it were but as the meaningless babble of an infant.
In the world whereon she stood or floated—for our commonplace to them would be miraculous, while what we call miracle is there a daily happening—there was a stir and moving to and fro, as of leaves swayed by a sudden breeze. One of their number had willed to leave them, and seeking our earth—known to him as the theatre of the wondrous drama of redemption—to don our uniform of flesh and strike one good blow against sin. And this, by a law of his world, was possible to him.
He stood, a tall, radiant figure, before One appointed to hear such requests and decide upon them.
“Have you thought well upon the matter?” it was asked him. “It is nothing that, though you may choose to go or stay, you may by no means choose your post in the battle. No good soldier would grumble at that; nor, to say truth, is the difference between what there they call riches and poverty, high and low, happiness and misery, at all worth considering. But have you thought upon the horribleness, the awful, slimy infectiousness, of the foe you must close with in a death grapple? Have you considered the sinfulness of sin?”