“The happiness of the beasts which perish!” said the Rector emphatically.
“Well, the beasts, as a rule, have a very good time of it during their lives; as to the rest, we all perish at last.”
“The body, but not the soul.”
“Ah, that I do not know. I may have a soul, but I am not certain; but I have a body, and as long as that is at ease, why should I trouble about things in the next life?”
“Do you ever think of the hereafter?”
“Never! If I die, I die! While I live, I live! I prefer present certainty to future doubt.”
Mr. Carriston was silent, as he did not care about arguing theology with this subtle Greek, whose religion, whose philosophy, assumed Protean forms to meet every objection. He was full of sophistry and double dealing, an unfair adversary in every sense of the word, and was so encased in his armor of self-complacency and egotism, that he could never be brought to look at things either spiritual or material in any light than that which satisfied the selfishness of his own soul. The Rector, therefore, avoided the threatened argument, and applied himself to his wine, which was a much more agreeable task than attempting to convince this egoist that the supreme aim of life was not the pampering of the passions of the individual man.
“Apart from the theological aspect of the case,” said Carriston good-humoredly, “it is rather a mistaken thing to live only for one’s self. Where ignorance is bliss, I grant; but, because you know no higher life than that of the body, you at once assume that there can be no happier existence.”
“Oh, I do not say that,” answered Caliphronas lightly. “No doubt you people who mortify the flesh, who listen to the voice of conscience, who consider the soul more than the body, and who look upon this life as a preparation for a future existence, are happy in your self-torturings. All that sort of thing came in with Anno Domini, and made the mediæval ages a hell of anguish; but I—I am a Greek—a pagan, if it pleases you—who looks on this world not as a prison, but as a garden wherein to live happily. Your mourning Man of Sorrows is entirely opposed to our joyous Apollo, your gloomy views of life to our serenity of temperament. The difference is plain: for you, a Christian, cannot understand the joyous songs of Paganism; I, a pagan, shudder at your penitential psalms of Christianity. We would neither of us ever convince the other, therefore an argument which has not a common basis from which to start is unprofitable.”
“I am not going to argue,” replied Carriston, smiling, “and I agree with you that arguments are unprofitable. Unless the change takes place in your own breast, it would be worse than useless for me to attempt to reason with you. But you are evidently not of the opinion of an Elizabethan ancestor of mine, among whose papers I discovered the following lyric:—