“Well, a guitar; it’s all the same. People read that with a grave face. He’s quite a good sort and so forth.” Channing paused for a moment and gazed reflectively at the wine in his glass, took a sip and went on: “Don’t you think the thousands of people who read that stuff, and admire it, must have lost all sense of the horrible thing that evil is? The sense that evil is a reality, a thing to fill us with the wildest horror if one could only appreciate it, a very real thing, and a very determined thing, and a thing all black; yet we get people playing in fancy with, and even laughing about, this horror. And writers painting the cuttle-fish center of it as a semi-sentimental idiot capable of assuming evening clothes and talking twaddle, or criticizing plays as he does in Satan Montgomery’s poem. We don’t play with a thing we loathe even in fancy. But we—I mean Christians—play with the idea of the devil as if it were a poodle dog. The truth is that Christians don’t fear the Power of Evil, they fear the Power of Good. They praise him, propitiate and worship him in a most fulsome manner, and say they love him. I tell you this for a fact that no man can love good who does not abhor evil, and you can’t abhor a thing that you play with.”
“Do you abhor evil, Mr. Channing?” asked Jane.
“Honestly, I do. Any one with eyes and the capacity for thought who lives in China must.”
“Then you must love good?”
“One does not ‘love’ the sun, one worships it, so to speak—but this is all very strange my talking like this; my business in life is mainly silk and racehorses.”
“’Scuse me,” said George du Telle, who was swaying slightly in his chair, the gone-out cigar still stuck in the side of his mouth, his face bulged and red, and his eye a fixity. “’Scuse me.”
“One moment, George—Well, I think, Mr. Channing, there are worse Christians in the world than you are.”
“Perhaps there are worse men, but I don’t claim to be a Christian. Only a man who recognizes fearfully the existence of evil as well as good.”
“’Scuse me,” said George du Telle, speaking loudly now as if he were calling a servant or railway porter. “I’m not going to have this sort of thing at my table. I’m a Christian, brought up a Christian, die one. ’M not going to—”
“George!” said his wife in a mild voice, but a voice very steady and full of command.