When Cyril Hadrian still considered truth knowable and virtue measurable he had charge of a great fortress of learning and scholarship called the Lord Institute. Those within the fortress' thick walls had gathered together to battle common enemies--ignorance, illness, and poverty. Hadrian, a man committed to rationality and to the notion that science in the service of humanity could accomplish at least a limited happiness on earth, did not then concern himself with philosophical questions, or with those seemingly-unanswerable questions regarding God, time, and purpose until his wife,...