“We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.”

“With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.”

“Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man's tribute to unconquered nature.”

“For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels.”

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

“I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.”

“Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world.”