to do in his own youthful days; he comes up to Moses, professing to be horrified at this particular offence.  ’These young people,’ he says, ’the way they go on!  It’s a sin, that’s what it is.  And you, Moses, I’m ashamed of you.  This sort of thing ought to be stopped.  It ought to be publicly reprimanded in those blessed Tables of yours.’  ‘A sin?’ says gentle Moses.  ’You surprise me, Aaron.  I confess it never struck me in that light before.  But I think I see your point.  We have a conference to-night on the Holy Mountain; I may be able to get a clause inserted—­’ ‘Do, there’s a good fellow,’ says the other.  ‘But aren’t you a little hard on the youngsters?’ asks Moses.  ’You wouldn’t believe it, but I was a boy myself once and I should have got into a lot of rows if such an enactment had been in existence then.  Moreover (and here his eyes assume a rapt, prophetic look) I seem to see, rising out of the distant future, a personage of royal line, beloved of God—­one David who, if your proposal were to come into force, would be classed as a pretty hot sinner,’ ’Oh, bother David!  Look here, I’m not asking for a loan of money, old man.  Just see to it that my New Sin is inscribed on the Tables.  Hang it all!  What’s that, to a man of your influence up there?  You can’t think how it annoys me nowadays to see all these young people—­all these young people—­need I go into particulars?’ ‘You needn’t.  I’m not altogether a fool,’ says gentle Moses.  ’And I’ll see what I can do to oblige you, if only for the sake of your dear mother.’”

The bishop, at the end of this narration, could not help smiling.

“That,” continued Keith, “is how Moses gets talked over by the Pharisees.  That is how sins are manufactured and classified.  And from that preposterous old Hebrew system of right and wrong they jump straight into our English penal code.  And there they sit tight,” he added.

“Is that your quarrel with what you call the upstairs god system?”

“Precisely!  It affects me by its unsanitary tendency to multiply sins; that is to say, when it transforms those sins into legal crimes.  How would you like to be haled before a Court of law for some ridiculous trifle, which became a crime only because it used to be a sin, and became a sin only because some dyspeptic old antediluvian was envious of his neighbour’s pleasure?  Our statute-book reeks of discarded theories of conduct; the serpent’s trail of the theologian, of the reactionary, is over all.”

“It never struck me in that light before,” said Mr. Heard.

“No?  Our reverence for inspired idiots:  has it never struck you?  Don’t you realize that we are still in the stage of that enfant terrible of Christianity, Paul of Tarsus, and his gift of tongues?  In the stage of these Russians here, with their decayed Messiah?  What do you think of them?”