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For He made the world and all that is in it. And He made it with a moral end in view, as we most of us believe. But not the wisest of us pretends that that moral object is clearly visible. It does not disclose itself to us directly; we are aware of it only indirectly; and are influenced by it forevermore. If the world was so made, who are we that think ourselves so much more adroit than Him as to be able to expose boldly what He veils and to reveal what He hath hidden?

There are those, of course, who see no moral explanation of the universe; but they are not always consistent. There is that famous passage of Joseph Conrad’s in which he declines the ethical view and says he would fondly regard the panorama of creation as pure spectacle—the marvellous spectacle being, perchance, a moral end in itself. And yet no man ever wrote with a deeper manifestation and a more perfect concealment of his moral purpose than Conrad; for exactly the thing to which all his tales are passionate witnesses is the sense of fidelity, of loyalty, of endurance—above all, the sense of fidelity—that exists in mankind. Man, in the Conradist view, is a creature of an inexhaustible loyalty to himself and to his fellows. This inner and utter fidelity it is which makes the whole legend of Lord Jim, which is the despairing cry that rings out at the last in Victory, which reaches lyric heights in Youth, which is the profound pathos of The End of the Tether, which, in its corruption by an incorruptible metal, the silver of the mine, forms the dreadful tragedy of Nostromo. An immortal, Conrad, but not the admiring and passive spectator he diffidently declares himself to be!