Daniel 4 taken as the history of the race rather than as one king's madness. A watcher, a holy one, comes down from heaven and cries: hew the tree down, cut off its branches, strip its leaves, scatter its fruit - but leave the stump, do not disturb it, and let it be watered with the dew of heaven. Then the imagery turns from a tree to a person: let him dwell with the beasts of the field, take from him the mind of a man and give to him the mind of a beast, and let seven times pass over him, until he knows that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will. Neville is blunt about who issued the order: God did, and it is the order from on high. His evidence is contemporary and unflattering - go back twenty years, what beast in the world would have conceived of ovens to burn innocent people by the millions? He names Stalin, ten years dead that week and written about in three newspapers he had read that day, with Molotov and the rest shaking like little children in his presence; and Hitler, who hated everything. Both rejected the story, one calling it the opiate of humanity after Marx, the other calling Christ weakness because he could not kill. In the eyes of the world they looked advanced because they were powerful in the misuse of power, and Neville says they are descending: seven times must pass over that mind before it can accept the story. Daniel 3 is folded in by the same number - heat the furnaces seven times more than they were wont to be - and by the count in the fire: three were put in, the threefold or three-dimensional man, and the king saw four, the fourth having the form of a Son of God. Kept apart from its parent, which carries men destined to be trees in the garden of God: that motif is the restoration, this one is the felling and the interval.