BURGE.  It’s all up with the Church now.  Thanks to you, we go to the country with one cry and one only.  Back to the Bible!  Think of the effect on the Nonconformist vote.  You gather that in with one hand; and you gather in the modern scientific sceptical professional vote with the other.  The village atheist and the first cornet in the local Salvation Army band meet on the village green and shake hands.  You take your school children, your Bible class under the Cowper-Temple clause, into the museum.  You shew the kids the Piltdown skull; and you say, ’Thats Adam.  Thats Eve’s husband.’  You take the spectacled science student from the laboratory in Owens College; and when he asks you for a truly scientific history of Evolution, you put into his hand The Pilgrim’s Progress.  You—­[Savvy and Haslam explode into shrieks of merriment].  What are you two laughing at?

SAVVY.  Oh, go on, Mr Burge.  Dont stop.

HASLAM.  Priceless!

FRANKLYN.  Would thirty years of office for the Liberal Party seem so important to you, Mr Burge, if you had another two and a half centuries to live?

BURGE [decisively] No.  You will have to drop that part of it.  The constituencies wont swallow it.

LUBIN [seriously] I am not so sure of that, Burge.  I am not sure that it may not prove the only point they will swallow.

BURGE.  It will be no use to us even if they do.  It’s not a party point.  It’s as good for the other side as for us.

LUBIN.  Not necessarily.  If we get in first with it, it will be associated in the public mind with our party.  Suppose I put it forward as a plank in our program that we advocate the extension of human life to three hundred years!  Dunreen, as leader of the opposite party, will be bound to oppose me:  to denounce me as a visionary and so forth.  By doing so he will place himself in the position of wanting to rob the people of two hundred and thirty years of their natural life.  The Unionists will become the party of Premature Death; and we shall become the Longevity party.

BURGE [shaken] You really think the electorate would swallow it?

LUBIN.  My dear Burge:  is there anything the electorate will not swallow if it is judiciously put to them?  But we must make sure of our ground.  We must have the support of the men of science.  Is there serious agreement among them, Doctor, as to the possibility of such an evolution as you have described?

CONRAD.  Yes.  Ever since the reaction against Darwin set in at the beginning of the present century, all scientific opinion worth counting has been converging rapidly upon Creative Evolution.

FRANKLYN.  Poetry has been converging on it:  philosophy has been converging on it:  religion has been converging on it.  It is going to be the religion of the twentieth century:  a religion that has its intellectual roots in philosophy and science just as medieval Christianity had its intellectual roots in Aristotle.