“But they must have known,” his son insisted, frowning. “God told them He would punish them if they tried to learn His secrets.”
“Yes,” Theodore assented—with the orthodox truth, more deceptive than a lie, that meant one thing to him and another to the world barbarian. “Yes, God told them so; but though He said it very plainly not many of them understood....” They were talking, he knew, across more than the gulf between the mind of a child and a man; between them lay the centuries, the barrier of many generations. To his son, now and always, dead and gone chemists and mathematicians must appear in the likeness of present evildoers—raiders of the territory and robbers of the property of God; to his son, now and always, inventors and spectacled professors in mortar-boards would be greedy, foolish chieftains who planned war against Heaven as a tribe plans assault upon its rivals. These were and must always be his “wicked,” his destroyers of the Golden Age; his life and outlook being what it was, how should he picture the war against Heaven as pure-hearted, instinctive and unconscious?
“Why not?” the child persisted, repeating the question when his father stroked his head absently.
“Because ... they did not know themselves. If they had known themselves and their own passions they would have seen why knowledge was forbidden.”
“Yes,” said the child vaguely—and passed to the matter that interested him.
“Why didn’t the others make them understand? You and the other good ones?”
“Because,” said Theodore, “we ourselves didn’t understand. That was the blunder—the sin—of the rest of us. We didn’t seek after knowledge, but we took the fruits of other men’s knowledge and ate.”
(Unconsciously he made use of the familiar hereditary simile.)
“I’d have killed them,” his son declared firmly. “Every one. I’d have told them to stop, and then, if they wouldn’t, I’d have killed them. Thrown them in the river—or hammered them with stones till they died. That’s what I’d have done.”
“No,” Theodore told him, “you wouldn’t have killed them.... One of them said the same thing to me—one of the wicked ones. He said we should have stamped out the race of them. Afterwards I knew he was right, but at the time I didn’t understand. I couldn’t. I heard what he said, but the words had no real meaning for me.”