"I do."
"Sit down then. Don't prowl about. I've got to be steadily serious and profound for at least ten minutes, and I need help."
Paul perceived a hassock at his feet and dropped on to it. "Carry on," he said, smiling a little as the other had meant him to do.
But Manning was in no hurry to begin. Before he began to speak, Timothy came past the window, saw the two sitting silently, and went on again, shaking his head and muttering to himself. And when Manning did begin to speak, he was abrupt, and there was a hard note in his voice.
"Look here, Paul," he said, "the root of the matter is just this: God is a guess in the dark. You are driven back and back and back, as you say, till you can't go further, but then you begin to invent meaningless words to cover your inadequacy. You talk about infinite and eternal and almighty, words which are no more than scraps of mathematical logic. The mind knows that it's beaten, that for some odd reason it cannot travel back beyond certain bounds. It's like space: you cannot conceive of something that ends, without your demanding what comes next. Something, you say, must come next, and next, and next. And there can't be a last; and yet there must be a last, an end..."
He stopped, as if he was trying once more himself to beat back against the reeling thought. Paul remained immovable.
"Well, now, the mind hates a vacuum. It must round off things. Thus, then, at that extreme limit of comprehension, when no further logical sequence is possible, it gets out of the difficulty by creating a conception upon which it can rest. Thought demands a beginning, an end, a supreme power, a reason, and the imagination of man, when his mind can no more, simply jumps in the dark. 'All right,' it says, 'there is One Who is Eternal, Almighty, Infinite—God.' A guess in the dark, you see."
Paul stared into that shifting black abyss. The horror of it rose into his eyes. Waves and seas, inexorable, heartless, rolled in upon him, and he felt himself sinking, sinking. The sensation was almost physical, and he had literally to moisten his lips to speak. "We have Christ," he said. "He was not in the dark. He knew."
Manning shrugged his shoulders at that, and said nothing.
"Arnold," cried Paul again, "He knew!"