“Fond of reading, are you? A village bookworm. Well, they say that to book-lovers every volume has a language and a mission of its own. What do my schoolboy voices tell you?”
“That you were once in love,” I answered quickly.
A half-amused, half-contemptuous shade passed across his face.
“Youth has its follies, like every other stage of life,” he said. “I daresay I experienced the luxury of the sensation once, but it must have been a long time ago. Come, is that all it tells you?”
“It tells me that men lie when they call you an Atheist.”
He sat quite still on his horse and the smile on his lips became a mocking one.
“Atheism was most unfashionable when those verses were written,” he remarked. “Any other ‘ism’ was popular enough, but Atheism sounded ugly. Besides, I was only a boy then. Perhaps I had some imagination left. It is a gift which one loses in later life.”
“But religion is not dependent upon imagination.”
“Wholly. Religion is an effort of imagination and, therefore, is more or less a matter of disposition. That is one of its chief absurdities. Women and sensitive boys are easiest affected by it. Men of sturdy common-sense, men with brains and the knowledge how to use them, are every day bursting the trammels of an effete orthodoxy.”
“And what can their common-sense and their brains give them in its place?” I asked. “I cannot conceive any practical religion without orthodoxy.”