CHAPTER III
Reason Is Again Enthroned
Slowly the days brought new life to the convalescent, despite his occasional attacks of theological astigmatism. And these attacks grew less frequent and less marked as the poor bones once more involved themselves in firm flesh—to the glad relief of a harried and scandalised old gentleman whose black forebodings had daily moved him to visions of the mad-house for his best-loved descendant.
Yet there were still dreadful times when the young man on the couch blasphemed placidly by the hour, with an insane air of assuming that those about him held the same opinions; as if the Christian religion were a pricked bubble the adherents of which had long since vanished.
If left by himself he could often be heard chuckling and muttering between chuckles: "I will get me honour upon Pharaoh and all his host. I have hardened his heart and the heart of his host that I might show these my signs before him."
Entering the room, the old gentleman might be met with:
"I certainly agree with you, sir, in every respect— Christianity was an invertebrate materialism of separation —crude, mechanical separation—less spiritual, less ethical, than almost any of the Oriental faiths. Affirming the brotherhood of man, yet separating us into a heaven and a hell. Christians cowering before a being of divided power, half-god and half-devil. Indeed, I remember no religion so non-moral—none that is so baldly a mere mechanical device for meeting the primitive mind's need to set its own tribe apart from all others—or in the later growth to separate the sheep from the goats, by reason of the opinion formed of certain evidence. Even schoolboys nowadays know that no moral value inheres in any opinion formed upon evidence. Yet, I dare say it was doubtless for a long period an excellent religion for marauding nations."
Or, again, after a long period of apparently rational talk, the unfortunate young man would break out with, "And how childish its wonder-tales were, of iron made to swim, of a rod turned to a serpent, of a coin found in a fish's mouth, of devils asking to go into swine, of a fig-tree cursed to death because it did not bear fruit out of season—how childish that tale of a virgin mother, who conceived 'without sin,' as it is somewhere naïvely put—an ideal of absolutely flawless falsity. Even the great old painters were helpless before it. They were driven to make mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality. It's not easy to idealise mere physical motherhood. You see, that was the wrong, perverted idea of motherhood—'conceiving without sin.' It's an unclean dogma in its implications. I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus—a sort of cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say seems now to have a certain crude truth in it. He said: 'There's my old mother, seventy-eight this spring, bent, gray, and wasted with the work of raising us seven children; she's slaved so hard for fifty years that she's worn her wedding-ring to a fine thread, and her hands look as if they had a thousand knuckles and joints in them. But she smiles like a girl of sixteen, she was never cross or bitter to one of us hounds, and I believe she never even wanted to complain in all her days. And there's a look of noble capacity in her face, of soul dignity, that you never saw in any Madonna's. I tell you no "virgin mother" could be as beautiful as my mother, who bore seven children for love of my father and for love of the thought of us.' Isn't it queer, sir, that I remember that—for it seemed only grotesque at the time I heard it."
It was after this extraordinary speech, uttered with every sign of physical soundness, that young Dr. Merritt confided to the old man when they had left the study: