Into the workshop of Richard’s mind was now introduced by Barbara a new idea of divinity. One of the best services a true man can do a neighbour is to persuade him to house his thought-children for a while that he may know what they are. From Barbara’s house Richard had taken into his a vital protoplasmic idea that must work, and would never cease to work until the house itself was all divine—the idea, namely, of a being to call God who was a delight to think of, the complete opposite of everything Richard had hitherto associated with the word God. The one door to admit this formal notion was hard to open, and when admitted, the figure was not easy to set up so that it could be looked at. The human niche where the idea of a God must stand, was in Richard’s house occupied by the most hideous falsity. On the pedestal crouched the goblin of a Japanese teapot.

It was not pleasant to Richard to imagine any one with rights over him. It may be that some persist in calling up the false idea of such a one hitherto presented to them, in order to avoid feeling obligation to believe in him. For the notion of a God is one from which naturally a thoughtful man must more or less recoil while as yet he knows nothing of the being himself, or of the nature of his creative rights, the rights of perfect, self-refusing, devoted fatherhood.

It is one thing to seem to know with the brain, quite another to know with the heart. But even in the hope-lighted countenance of Barbara, even in the tones in which she suggested the presence of a soul that meant more, and was all that the beautiful world seemed to hint, Richard could not fail to meet something of the true idea of a God.

Naturally also, his notion of the God in whom he felt that Barbara was at least ready to believe, assumed something of the look of Barbara who was being drawn toward him. The graces of the world, all its lovely impacts upon his senses, now began to be mixed up in his mind with Barbara and her God. Barbara began to infect him with—shall I call it the superstition of a God? Whatever it may be called, it was very far from being religion yet. The fact was only this—that the idea of a God worth believing in, was coming a little nearer to him, was becoming to him a little more thinkable.