FRANKLYN.  The Book of Genesis is a part of nature like any other part of nature.  The fact that the tale of the Garden of Eden has survived and held the imagination of men spellbound for centuries, whilst hundreds of much more plausible and amusing stories have gone out of fashion and perished like last year’s popular song, is a scientific fact; and Science is bound to explain it.  You tell me that Science knows nothing of it.  Then Science is more ignorant than the children at any village school.

CONRAD.  Of course if you think it more scientific to say that what we are discussing is not Adam and Eve and Eden, but the phylogeny of the blastoderm—­

SAVVY.  You neednt swear, Nunk.

CONRAD.  Shut up, you:  I am not swearing. [To Lubin] If you want the professional humbug of rewriting the Bible in words of four syllables, and pretending it’s something new, I can humbug you to your heart’s content.  I can call Genesis Phylogenesis.  Let the Creator say, if you like, ’I will establish an antipathetic symbiosis between thee and the female, and between thy blastoderm and her blastoderm.’  Nobody will understand you; and Savvy will think you are swearing.  The meaning is the same.

HASLAM.  Priceless.  But it’s quite simple.  The one version is poetry:  the other is science.

FRANKLYN.  The one is classroom jargon:  the other is inspired human language.

LUBIN [calmly reminiscent] One of the few modern authors into whom I have occasionally glanced is Rousseau, who was a sort of Deist like Burge—­

BURGE [interrupting him forcibly] Lubin:  has this stupendously important communication which Professor Barnabas has just made to us:  a communication for which I shall be indebted to him all my life long:  has this, I say, no deeper effect on you than to set you pulling my leg by trying to make out that I am an infidel?

LUBIN.  It’s very interesting and amusing, Burge; and I think I see a case in it.  I think I could undertake to argue it in an ecclesiastical court.  But important is hardly a word I should attach to it.

BURGE.  Good God!  Here is this professor:  a man utterly removed from the turmoil of our political life:  devoted to pure learning in its most abstract phases; and I solemnly declare he is the greatest politician, the most inspired party leader, in the kingdom.  I take off my hat to him.  I, Joyce Burge, give him best.  And you sit there purring like an Angora cat, and can see nothing in it!

CONRAD [opening his eyes widely] Hallo!  What have I done to deserve this tribute?

SURGE.  Done!  You have put the Liberal Party into power for the next thirty years, Doctor:  thats what you’ve done.

CONRAD.  God forbid!