“Oh, God, forgive this insane passion in my boy!”

“It was passion, sir—­” he spoke with a sudden relenting—­“but try to remember that I’ve sought the truth honestly.”

“You degrade the Saviour.”

“No; I only raise man out of the muck of Christian belief about him.  If common men all might live lives of greater sacrifice than Jesus did, without any pretensions to the supernatural, it only means that we need a new embodiment for our ideals.  If we find it in man—­in God’s creature—­so much the better for man and so much the more glory to God, who has not then bungled so wretchedly as Christianity teaches.”

“God forgive you this tirade—­I know it is the sickness.”

“I shall try to speak calmly, sir—­but how much longer can an educated clergy keep a straight face to speak of this wretchedly impotent God?  Christians of a truth have had to bind their sense of humour as the Chinese bound their women’s feet.  But the laugh is gathering even now.  Your religion is like a tree that has lain long dead in the forest—­firm wood to the eye but dust to the first blow.  And this is how it will go—­from a laugh—­not through the solemn absurdities of the so-called higher criticism, the discussing of this or that miracle, the tracing of this or that myth of fall or deluge or immaculate conception or trinity to its pagan sources; not that way, when before the inquiring mind rises the sheer materialism of the Christian dogma, bristling with absurdities—­its vain bungling God of one tribe who crowns his career of impotencies—­in all but the art of slaughter—­by instituting the sacrifice of a Son begotten of a human mother, to appease his wrath toward his own creatures; a God who even by this pitiful device can save but a few of us.  Was ever god so powerless?  Do you think we who grow up now do not detect it?  Is it not time to demand a God of virtue, of integrity, of ethical dignity—­a religion whose test shall be moral, and not the opinion one forms of certain alleged material phenomena?”

When he had first spoken the old man cowered low and lower in his chair, with little moans of protest at intervals, perhaps a quick, almost gasping, “God forgive him!” or a “Lord have mercy!” But as the talk went on he became slowly quieter, his face grew firmer, he sat up in his chair, and at the last he came to bend upon the speaker a look that made him falter confusedly and stop.

“I can say no more, sir; I should not have said so much.  Oh, Grandad, I wouldn’t have hurt you for all the world, yet I had to let you know why I could not do what you had planned—­and I was fool enough to think I could justify myself to you!”

The old eyes still blazed upon him with a look of sorrow and of horror that was yet, first of all, a look of power; the look of one who had mastered himself to speak calmly while enduring uttermost pain.