Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/287

 same, or at any rate closely similar, periodic upheavals went on. The world was stifling; it was in a fever, and these phenomena were neither more nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism against the ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitation of its life. Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living. Men obeyed their base immediate motives until the world grew unendurably bitter. Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them--darkly indeed, but yet enough for indistinct vision--the crowded squalor, the dark enclosure of life. A sudden disgust with the insensate smallness of the old-world way of living, a realisation of sin, a sense of the unworthiness of all individual things, a desire for something comprehensive, sustaining, something greater, for wider communions and less habitual things, filled them. Their souls, which were shaped for wider issues, cried out suddenly amidst the petty interests, the narrow prohibitions, of life, "Not this! not this!" A great passion to escape from the jealous prison of themselves, an inarticulate, stammering, weeping passion shook them. . ..

I have seen--I remember how once in Clayton Calvinistic Methodist chapel I saw--his spotty fat face strangely distorted under the flickering gas-flares--old Pallet the ironmonger repent. He went to the form of repentance, a