§ 2
“Ah, Mr. Huss, Mr. Huss!” said Sir Eliphaz.
His eye seemed seeking some point of attachment, and found it at last in the steel engraving of Queen Victoria giving a Bible to a dusky potentate, which adorned the little parlour.
“Your sickness colours your vision,” said Sir Eliphaz. “What you say is so profoundly true and so utterly false. Mysteriously evolved, living as you say in a mere bloom of air and moisture upon this tiny planet, how could we exist, how could we continue, were we not sustained in every moment by the Mercy and Wisdom of God? The flimsier life is, the greater the wonder of his Providence. Not a sparrow,” said Sir Eliphaz, and then enlarging the metaphor with a boom in his voice, “not a hair of my head, falls to the ground without His knowledge and consent.... I am a man much occupied. I cannot do the reading I would. But while you have been reviling the works of God I have been thinking of some wonders....”
Sir Eliphaz lifted up a hand with thumb and finger opposed, as though he held some exquisite thing therein.
“The human eye,” said Sir Eliphaz, with an intensity of appreciation that brought tears to his own....
“The cross-fertilization of plants....
“The marvellous transformations of the higher insects....
“The highly elaborate wing scales of the Lepidoptera.
“The mercy that tempers the wind to the shorn lamb....
“The dark warm marvels of embryology; the order and rhythm and obedience with which the cells of the fertilized ovum divide to build up the perfect body of a living thing, yea, even of a human being—in God’s image. First there is one cell, then two; the process of division is extremely beautiful and is called, I believe, karyokinesis; then after the two come four, each knows his part, each divides certainly and marvellously; eight, sixteen, thirty-two.... Each of those thirty-two cells is a complete thirty-second part of a man. Presently this cell says, ‘I become a hair’; this, ‘a blood corpuscle,’ this ‘a cell in the brain of a man, to mirror the universe.’ Each goes to his own appointed place....
“Would that we could do the like!” said Sir Eliphaz.
“Then consider water,” said Sir Eliphaz. “I am not deeply versed in physical science, but there are certain things about water that fill me with wonder and amaze. All other liquids contract when they solidify. With one or two exceptions—useful in the arts. Water expands. Now water is a non-conductor of heat, and if water contracted and became heavier when it became ice, it would sink to the bottom of the polar seas and remain there unmelted. More ice would sink down to it, until all the ocean was ice and life ceased. But water does not do so. No!... Were it not for the vapour of water, which catches and entangles the sun’s heat, this world would scorch by day and freeze by night. Mercy upon mercy, I myself,” said Sir Eliphaz in tones of happy confession, “am ninety per cent. water.... We all are....
“And think how mercifully winter is tempered to us by the snow! When water freezes in the air in winter-time, it does not come pelting down as lumps of ice. Conceivably it might, and then where should we be? But it belongs to the hexagonal system—a system prone to graceful frameworks. It crystallizes into the most delicate and beautiful lace of six-rayed crystals—wonderful under the microscope. They flake delicately. They lie loosely one upon another. Out of ice is woven a warm garment like wool, white like wool because like wool it is full of air—a warm garment for bud and shoot....
“Then again—you revile God for the parasites he sends. But are they not sent to teach us a great moral lesson? Each one for himself and God for us all. Not so the parasites. They choose a life of base dependence. With that comes physical degeneration, swift and sure. They are the Socialists of nature. They lose their limbs. They lose colour, become blenched, unappetising beings, vile creatures of sloth—often microscopic. Do they not urge us by their shameful lives to self help and exertion? Yet even parasites have a use! I am told that were it not for parasitic bacteria man could not digest his food. A lichen again is made up of an alga and a fungus, mutually parasitic. That is called symbiosis—living together for a mutual benefit. Maybe every one of those thousands of parasites you deem so horrible is working its way upward towards an arrangement—”
Sir Eliphaz weighed his words: “Some mutually advantageous arrangement with its host. A paying guest.
“And finally,” said Sir Eliphaz, with the roll of distant thunder in his voice, “think of the stately procession of life upon the earth, through a myriad of forms the glorious crescendo of evolution, up to its climax, man. What a work is man! The paragon of creation, the microcosm of the cosmos, the ultimate birth of time.... And you would have us doubt the guiding hand!”
He ceased with a gesture.
Mr. Dad made a noise like responses in church.