Page:The One Woman (1903).pdf/132

 its thousands of houses within his huge paws. His eyes were enormous and blood-red, his breath hot.

"I moved back, gasping with surprise and horror, to find it was only a spider crawling down his slender thread on the window close to my eye. It was a fevered delusion, but it haunted me for days, and haunts me still.

"I am growing in the conviction that the very foundations of morals are shifting, and that Religion, Society and Civilisation must readjust themselves or humanity sink into unspeakable degradation.

"Belief in the old religious authority is gone. Our church is thronged because of a peculiar personal power with which I am endowed. I could wield that power without a church, society, creed or Bible. Esthetic forces now draw people to non-ritualistic churches that once came for prayer and preaching. The preacher must secularise his sermon or talk to vacant pews. Historic Christianity has been destroyed by Criticism. A thousand wild Isms nourish in the twilight of this eclipse of Faith, while Materialism and the Pursuit of Pleasure strangle out spiritual hopes."

"And you are the seer called to lead out of this chaos," the woman whispered. "I know this from my own life. But for you I would be listening to idiotic platitudes, cultivating sham, my very soul 'crucified between a whimper and a smile.' I owe it to you that I am a woman—not a cross between an angel and an idiot."