“You seem to have a standing quarrel with the creation, George! Yet one might think you had as little ground as most people to complain of your portion in it,” said Helen.
“Well, you know, I don’t complain for myself. I don’t pretend to think I am specially ill-used. But I am not everybody. And then there’s such a lot of born-fools in it!”
“If they are born-fools they can’t help it.”
“That may be; only it makes it none the pleasanter for other people; but, unfortunately, they are not the only or the worst sort of fools. For one born-fool there are a thousand wilful ones. For one man that will honestly face an honest argument, there are ten thousand that will dishonestly shirk it. There’s that curate-fellow now—Wingfold I think aunt called him—look at him now!”
“I can’t see much in him to rouse indignation,” said Helen. “He seems a very inoffensive man.”
“I don’t call it inoffensive when a man sells himself to the keeping up of a system that——”
Here Bascombe checked himself, remembering that a sudden attack upon what was, at least, the more was the pity, a time-honoured system, might rouse a woman’s prejudices; and as Helen had already listened to a large amount of undermining remark without perceiving the direction of his tunnels, he resolved, before venturing an open assault, to make sure that those prejudices stood, lightly borne, over an abyss of seething objection. He had had his experiences as the prophet-pioneer of glad tidings to the nations, and had before now, although such weakness he could not anticipate in Helen, seen one whom he considered a most promising pupil, turned suddenly away in a storm of terror and disgust.
“What a folly is it now,” he instantly resumed, leaving the general and attacking a particular, “to think to make people good by promises and threats—promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in the human system!”
“All nations have believed in a future state, either of reward or punishment,” objected Helen.
“Mere Brocken-spectres of their own approbation or disapprobation of themselves. And whither has it brought the race?”