Wingfield looked at her gratefully, conscious that she had justified what he had feared had been a foolish observation.
“Katharine,” said Mrs. Bright, who had not spoken for a long time, “if you’re going to talk theology, I shall go to bed—like the baron in the Ingoldsby legends. ‘There are no windows to break, and they can’t get in’—do you remember? So he went to bed and slept soundly through the siege. It’s exactly the same with theology, my dear. It’s all been discussed a hundred thousand times, and yet nobody ever gets in. There’s only one religion the whole world over, and that is, to do the best one can and help other people—because no one can do better than the best he can, according to what he thinks right. And there’s a great deal in soap, my dear. I’m sure people feel like better people when they’re clean, and as people do what they feel, why, they really are better people. I’d like to try free soap in the State of New York for a year, and see whether it didn’t improve the criminal statistics.”
“It’s a splendid election cry, mother,” said Bright. “ ‘Soap—Something—and Stability.’ We’ll try it some day.”
“No, but there’s truth in it,” protested Mrs. Bright. “Isn’t there, Mr. Griggs?”
“Of course,” answered Griggs, gravely. “Every religion that ever existed has some rules of ablution. And there’s a lot of truth in the other things you said, Mrs. Bright. Only the trouble is, a code of action—what you call doing the best one can—doesn’t satisfy humanity. The average human being won’t do anything for its own sake. He must do it for his own advantage here—or hereafter, since people will insist on using that idiotic word.”
“Why idiotic?” asked Wingfield, very naturally.
“Hereafter means a future, and there isn’t any such thing, except in a small way, for matter-worlds and such little trifles, which go to pieces every two or three thousand million years.”
“Yes, but the soul—if we’ve got one.”
Wingfield added the last conditional expression rather sheepishly, as though he suspected that the highly intellectual beings amongst whom he found himself might have done away with such old-fashioned nonsense as the soul.
“Of course you’ve got a soul,” said Griggs, rather impatiently. “But if it’s a real soul, it has no weight and no size, and no shape and no colour, nor anything resembling matter—nor anything with which to resemble anything, except other souls. Well, of course you know that time is only conceivable in relation to matter in motion, so that where there isn’t any matter, there isn’t any time. And where there’s no time there can’t be portions of time, which are past, present, and future. So the soul has no time, doesn’t exist in relation to time, and consequently can’t be said to have a hereafter. The body has a hereafter—oh, yes—it’s absorbed into the elements and lives over again thousands of millions of times. But the soul hasn’t. It’s eternal. If it always is to be, as we say, comparing it to matter, why, then, it always was, by the same comparison. But the fact is, that ‘it is’—and there’s no more to be said. ‘It is,’ and as it’s indestructible, not being matter, by the hypothesis, nothing can be said of it in that respect except that ‘it is.’ You can’t say that an axiom, for instance, has a past, present, and future, can you? Well—if the soul’s anything, it’s axiomatic. There, I’ve bored you to death—shall I tear another pack of cards for you, or break silver dollars to amuse you? I’ll do anything I’m told, now that I’ve had my say.”