BURGE [pricking up his ears] Whats that?  If you can establish that, Barnabas, I am prepared to hear you out with my very best attention.  I am listening.  Go on.

FRANKLYN.  Well, you remember, don’t you, that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not created mortal, and that natural death, as we call it, was not a part of life, but a later and quite separate invention?

SURGE.  Now you mention it, thats true.  Death came afterwards.

LUBIN.  What about accidental death?  That was always possible.

FRANKLYN.  Precisely.  Adam and Eve were hung up between two frightful possibilities.  One was the extinction of mankind by their accidental death.  The other was the prospect of living for ever.  They could bear neither.  They decided that they would just take a short turn of a thousand years, and meanwhile hand on their work to a new pair.  Consequently, they had to invent natural birth and natural death, which are, after all, only modes of perpetuating life without putting on any single creature the terrible burden of immortality.

LUBIN.  I see.  The old must make room for the new.

SURGE.  Death is nothing but making room.  Thats all there is in it or ever has been in it.

FRANKLYN.  Yes; but the old must not desert their posts until the new are ripe for them.  They desert them now two hundred years too soon.

SAVVY.  I believe the old people are the new people reincarnated, Nunk.  I suspect I am Eve.  I am very fond of apples; and they always disagree with me.

CONRAD.  You are Eve, in a sense.  The Eternal Life persists; only It wears out Its bodies and minds and gets new ones, like new clothes.  You are only a new hat and frock on Eve.

FRANKLYN.  Yes.  Bodies and minds ever better and better fitted to carry out Its eternal pursuit.

LUBIN [with quiet scepticism] What pursuit, may one ask, Mr Barnabas?

FRANKLYN.  The pursuit of omnipotence and omniscience.  Greater power and greater knowledge:  these are what we are all pursuing even at the risk of our lives and the sacrifice of our pleasures.  Evolution is that pursuit and nothing else.  It is the path to godhead.  A man differs from a microbe only in being further on the path.

LUBIN.  And how soon do you expect this modest end to be reached?

FRANKLYN.  Never, thank God!  As there is no limit to power and knowledge there can be no end.  ‘The power and the glory, world without end’:  have those words meant nothing to you?

BURGE [pulling out an old envelope] I should like to make a note of that. [He does so].

CONRAD.  There will always be something to live for.

SURGE [pocketing his envelope and becoming more and more businesslike] Right:  I have got that.  Now what about sin?  What about the Fall?  How do you work them in?

CONRAD.  I don’t work in the Fall.  The Fall is outside Science.  But I daresay Frank can work it in for you.