theologians look in unlikely places for the light they lack. God created light out of darkness, and the students of man are coming to an understanding of God in the understanding of men; in the ever-revolving cycles of identical human experience under the laws of His life and ours.

That night in Paris, in that dismal, dark café, I saw that it was right to kill Moses on the last hill before the valley beyond: either it was divine justice or it was a miracle of mercy.

No such thought was in my mind when I went to the café. I was intent only upon meeting there a young Russian who wanted to go home. He had been in Paris all through the war and the revolution. I had just come back from Moscow, and he wished to ask me about the ways and means of making the pilgrimage. His appearance may have given my thoughts a biblical turn.

He looked like the Christ. Some Russians do, you know. In the gentle mobs of the first revolution in Petrograd marched blond men who were more Christ-like in aspect than Demetri Nikolovitch. He was dark, black. Not his face. That was white, a pale, glowing light; framed in and pitched high by black hair and a black beard, both full and fine and both parted in the middle. And the kind, intelligent spirit of the man looked tenderly out at you through eyes as clean, serene, and trustful as a deer's.

Afterward when I heard that he was caught and killed on the way, I wondered what kind of men they were that could aim rifles at a countenance like his and fire between such eyes. Then I remembered how, when I was a boy, I shot and wounded a doe that

looked up at me with eyes like his and, as they pleaded, dropped a tear. And I cut the creature's throat.

And the Christ Himself was killed; and before the end, after He had prayed, weeping, and appealing from human to divine justice. God would not let Jesus stay to see the fruits of His labors either.

But it was not the story of Jesus that came to me that night; it was the story of Moses. So I think it was not Demetri Nikolovitch that suggested the idea of justice, but those others who dropped in while we were talking. They were Russians too, revolutionists all. That was "their café." They "lived" there. And a sad, suppressed life they lived. Hope was gone out of it wholly.

As they moped in, one by one, and heard what we were talking about, they shook their heads, protesting.

"Don't go, Demetri Nikolovitch," they said. "It is not what you think."

He heard them, listening attentively to all they had to say, and he seemed to understand them profoundly. If ever there was sympathy in the gaze of a human being, it was in the caressing, wistful, helpless look he gave his friends when they bade him not to go to Russia. But he did not heed their advice. Nor did he attempt to answer them; not then. He told me later that he had tried before to lead them to see revolutionary Russia not as an end achieved, but as a beginning, as an opportunity to lay foundations for a new civilization that it will take generations to complete.

"They could not see it so," he said. "They cannot. They have thought always of the revolution as the realization of their ideals, of their very various ideas of the perfect society.

It is not that. It could not suit them all. It cannot for a long while meet anybody's expectations. I think of the revolution as a clearing of the ground, which now must be plowed, sown, worked, in order that the future may reap. I see what my friends see, the horrors of to-day. I cannot show them what I see: a to-morrow possibly better than any yesterday has ever been-possible if we of the present will go there and labor and serve and suffer for what can surely be."

So he spoke to me afterward, but to them that night he said none of these things. He waited; he talked patiently along other lines till there could be no rebuke in his persistence, then he returned softly to his first inquiry.

"You think, then, that Reval is the best place to go in from?" I answered him as best I could, but my interest turned to those others and their stories.

They were men who had given their lives to the revolution. They had labored for it; they had conspired, plotted, committed crimes for the revolution in Russia, and every one of them had done time in the prisons of Siberia or, escaped, waited and worked in exile for the revolution everywhere. They were leaders, too, faithful servants who had had out of their service no earthly reward; nothing but misery,

dirt, disease, and their dream. They were tired now; in body and in spirit those men were weary and disillusioned. They had seen the revolution; it had come; in their absence it had come to Russia first. Astonished and rejoicing, they had hurried, hunted and hiding, but happy, back to Petrograd. Their dream, the vision that had inspired and supported them through all the years of their wanderings in the wilderness-they had seen the realization of their high hopes; not from afar, not dimly from a hilltop. No. They had gone over into the Land of Promise.

There were seven of those witnesses that night. They told me seven stories. And the seven stories were all one story. I have heard others since, many, many more; not only of Russia, but of Hungary also, and Germany, France, Italy, England, Mexico; and before any of these, I recall now, in my own country, leaders with vision who had labored for a cause of the people and seen it win, achieving the chance to achieve achievements, great or small, and been awakened out of their dreaming.

The seven stories were one story; and the one story is seventy times seven stories, all told best the first time, in the Book, where it ends best.