"My father won't let us read anything of Bulwer's. Does he write very wicked books?"
"The one I speak of," said Ian, "is not wicked, though it is full of rubbish, and its religion is very false."
Whether Mercy meant to take her revenge on him with consciously bad logic, I am in doubt.
"Captain Macruadh! you astonish me! A Scotchman speak so of religion!"
"I spoke of the religion in that book. I said it was false—which is the same as saying it was not religion."
"Then religion is not all true!"
"All true religion is true," said Ian, inclined to laugh like one that thought to catch an angel, and had clutched a bat! "I was going on to say that, though the religion and philosophy of the book were rubbish, the story was fundamentally a grand conception. It puzzles me to think how a man could start with such an idea, and work it out so well, and yet be so lacking both in insight and logic. It is wonderful how much of one portion of our nature may be developed along with so little of another!"
"What is the story about?" asked Mercy.
"What I may call the canvas of it, speaking as if it were a picture, is the idea that the whole of space is full of life; that, as the smallest drop of water is crowded with monsters of hideous forms and dispositions, so is what we call space full of living creatures,—"
"How horrible!"