He told himself that every church-tower in the land overlooked a graveyard, and that in every graveyard was a vast empty grave waiting for the “Jealous Father of Men” who lived in the church. He knew there was just such a church-tower at King’s Barton, and another one at Ramsgard, and yet another at Blacksod, the town on the further side of Mr. Urquhart’s village.

He sat very upright now, as the train approached Andover; and the idea came into his head, as he fixed his gaze on his fellow traveller, the bluebottle fly, who was cleaning his front legs on a picture of Swanage pier, that from tower to tower of these West Country churches there might be sent, one gusty November night, a long-drawn melancholy cry, a cry heard only by dogs and horses and geese and cattle and village-idiots, the real death-cry of a god⁠—dead at last of extreme old age!

“Christ is different from God,” he said to himself. “Only when God is really dead will Christ be known for what He is. Christ will take the place of God then.”