CHAPTER I.
THE WARLOCKS There is beyond question, in human nature, such a thing as an inherited consciousness of God, and this consciousness, if inherited through many generations, may defy apparent reason, all progress of vaunted civilisations, and even, it may be suggested, the actual challenge of death itself.
This consciousness of God had been quite simply the foundation of Mr.
Warlock's history.

In the middle of the eighteenth century it expressed itself in the formula of John Wesley's revival; the John Wesley of that day preached up and down the length and breadth of Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham, and being a fighter, a preacher and a simple-minded human being at one and the same time, received a large following and died full of years and honours.
It was somewhere about 1830 that this John's grandson, James Warlock, Martin's grandfather, broke from the main body and led his little flock on to the wide spaces of Salisbury Plain.

James Warlock, unlike his father and grandfather, was a little sickly man with a narrow chest, no limbs to speak of and a sharp pale face.

Martin had a faded daguerreotype of him set against the background of the old Wiltshire kitchen, his black clothes hung upon him like a disguise, his eyes burning even upon that faded picture with the fire of his spirit.

For James Warlock was a mystic, a visionary, a prophet.