“How did they take it? Did they laugh?”
“Well, you have seen and heard him. You could not laugh, could you?”
“No, indeed. But you don’t take it seriously, Ned, do you? Look at the solid old earth of England. Look at our great hotel and the people on the Lees, and the stodgy morning papers and all the settled order of a civilised land. Do you really think that anything could come to destroy it all?”
“Who knows? Miromar is not the only one who says so.”
“Does he call it the end of the world?”
“No, no, it is the rebirth of the world—of the true world, the world as God meant it to be.”
“It is a tremendous message. But what is amiss? Why should so dreadful a Judgment fall?”
“It is the materialism, the wooden formalities of the churches, the alienation of all spiritual impulses, the denial of the Unseen, the ridicule of this new revelation—these are the causes according to him.”
“Surely the world has been worse before now?”
“But never with the same advantages—never with the education and knowledge and so-called civilisation, which should have led it to higher things. Look how everything has been turned to evil. We got the knowledge of airships. We bomb cities with them. We learn how to steam under the sea. We murder seamen with our new knowledge. We gain command over chemicals. We turn them into explosives or poison gases. It goes from worse to worse. At the present moment every nation upon earth is plotting secretly how it can best poison the others. Did God create the planet for this end, and is it likely that He will allow it to go on from bad to worse?”