“I always liked old Smathers. You’d like him too. He’s got one of the biggest funeral parlors in the state. I used to work for him and then, when I started on all this, he backed me up to the hilt. Lent me money to get as far as San Francisco. After that of course it was easy. I paid him back every cent.”
“Does he get here often?”
Cave shook his head. “No, he lets me use the farm but he keeps away. He says he doesn’t approve of what I’m doing. You see he’s Catholic.”
“But he still likes John,” said Iris who had been stroking a particularly ugly yellow cat beside the fire. So it was John now, I thought. Iris was the only person ever to call him by his first name.
“Yes. He’s a good friend.”
“There’ll be a lot of trouble, you know,” I said.
“From Smathers?”
“No, from the Catholics, from the Christians.”
“You really think so?” Cave looked at me curiously. I believe that until that moment he had never realized the inevitable collision of his point of view with that of the established religions.
“Of course I do. They’ve constructed an entire ethical system upon a supernatural foundation whose main strength is the promise of a continuation of human personality after death. You are rejecting grace, heaven, hell, the Trinity ...”