"'O Sophist, if our Religion in ancient Greece had had no other advantage than that of saving us from the works of "higher critics," it has deserved well of us. We were immune from that disease, at any rate. Dion of Prusa and others wrote declamations against the historicity of the Trojan War; but nobody took them for more than what they were, for rhetorical exercises. No Hellene would have paid the slightest attention, nor accorded the slightest recognition to men like yourself. The English must be suffering from very ugly religious crochets and spiritual eczemas, to have recourse to drugs and pills offered by such medicine-men.'
"Other friends in England to whom I expressed my profound aversion to this puny scepticism in matters of Religion, advised me to attend the sermons given by a relatively young man with white hair in a temple in the city. They said that in him and his addresses there was religious sentiment. I accepted their advice and went repeatedly to hear what was called The New Religion.
"The young man talked well and impressively. He told them that two and two made four, and absolutely refused to make five.
"With much emphasis he declared that he could not believe in miracles, because of the miraculous way in which they happened. If, he said, a miracle should happen in an orderly fashion, performed under police revision, say, in Regent Street in front of Peter Robinson's, the arrangement and whole sequence of the procedure being duly anticipated and announced by the Daily Nail or the Daily X-Rays, then indeed he would say: 'O Lord, O Lord, I am convinced.'
"'But,' the white-haired young man said, 'how can you, the rest of the world, or anyone else suppose that I could believe a miracle, that pops in from mid-air, in the most disorderly and unreasonable fashion, without having given notice either to the police or to the editor of the Daily Nail or the Daily X-Rays?
"'Such a miracle is a mere vagrant, a loafer, a déclassé or déraciné, as we say in Burmese. It has neither documents to legitimate itself with, nor any decent social connections. It disturbs the professor of physics at that great seat of untaught knowledge, the London University; it annoys all chemists, and confirms my colleagues in the other pulpits in their preposterous superstitions.
"'My brethren and sithren, I tell you there are no miracles; there never were any; there never can be any. Just let me tell you an interesting experience I had the other day with a man who travelled in the south of France, a country which, but for the fact that England is good enough to patronise her, would long since have disappeared from the surface of this or any other planet.
"'The gentleman in question spoke of Lourdes, and the miracles he had seen there. I listened for a while with patience; at last I could bear it no longer, and the following dialogue arose between us: