Light perpetual, in a universe where, the latest scientific reports indicate, expansion, propelled by some unknown factor called the dark force, is accelerating to the point where the stars will eventually be invisible to one another. By other proven laws they will burn out and drift as meaningless ash-heaps of forever inert matter. No one follows the latest turns of empirical cosmology more keenly than the village clergyman, hoping for some peep, around a cryptic equation’s corner, of divine mercy. One of the burdens, as Owen sees it, that the modern faithful shoulder is the monstrously enlarged context of time. Saint Paul thought the last trumpet would sound within the lifetime of some living—“Behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump”—and medieval men could still picture their intact skeletons clambering up, gumlessly grinning, out of their graves. The next world was around the corner, almost visitable, like the vaults beneath the cathedral floor. Now it must be relegated to another dimension, joining those subatomic strings whose mathematical invention may at last solve the riddle of existence: why did nothingness, the ground note of cosmic reality, the substratum that everlastingly endures, choose so troublesomely to violate itself and give birth to anything at all? The church in strategic retreat abandons the cosmos to physics, and takes refuge in the personal—the cosmos of fragile, evanescent consciousness. In that shadow-world, infinitely prolonged, Florence and Jameeka and Lara and Bruce consort, bathed in God’s indiscriminate love, and together mount from strength to strength. If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die. In the next verse, Paul ominously adds, Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.