"But what is it all about?" I asked.
"Haven't I told you about it again and again?" said he: "but with this wilful numbness of yours you won't remember anything. It is a Church of transcendent ambitions, Templeton, aspiring at no less than the planting under heaven before long of a tribe higher than man, though its methods of setting about it are of a naiveté bound at first to leave you alien to their mystery of meaning; its theory is that the fowl precedes the egg: it grapples with the parent, beginning at the base of the ladder, its eyes fixed on the flying galaxies; but you wouldn't catch a glimpse of all at your first visit, and, if you find anything queerish, remember sacring-bells and praying-mills, and remember that the first British person who happened to broach an umbrella in a public road cast twelve million fools into a brabble of laughter. Anyhow, I challenge you to go twice to the new Church without hungering to go thrice."
"You seem sincere," I said, "but you only wish to win me out of doors, I suppose. Where did Rivers get money from? He didn't use to be rich."
"But the whole hubbubboo is more or less early-Christian-communistic," answered Magee: "people pay, because it is costly, and earns its pay. Socialism just needed a religious nerve, didn't it? and here you have it. The base-wall of all is equality—'if one's neck-muscles alone are brawny,' Rivers always has it, 'he will call no man your lordship.' The idea is to preach and drill the nation into one army, the train-band of the times to come, for Rivers is the arch-foe of heterogeneity, he would have all men as twin as two perfect peas. But the Church is built on pity as well as on aspiration; equality is swallowed up in fraternity; charity is her riches, love is her festival. Run chiefly by women, she is an enthusiasm of the poor for the poor, and for the poorest of the poor, the child to be born; and to the poor a Gospel is again preached. You will find them all inflamed with the finest faith in the future, full of self-culture, ideality, good fellowship, and good food. The soul, too, is fed with a true emotion and communion of saints, as distinct from a fictitious: worship takes place."
"You seem quite enamoured," I said. "But worship of what?"
"Of God," said he.
"But which God?" said I, "the old God?"
"No," said he, "the new God."
"Ah, the new God," said I, "He is a most vague person: like Langler, I almost prefer the old God."
"But is it a question of preference?" asked Magee: "prefer as you please, you can't have the old God: He is as dead as His Church. But His death is, of course, phoenix-death, and the new God is only vague because the age is new, and men's brains only just enough evolved to see Him darkly; soon, I dare say. He will take the darlingest bright ship-shape. The old God too at first was pitched too high for men's eyes, hence lapses into idolatry and golden-calfishness, for idolatry is ever a soul-sloth, an idle backsliding to some lower, more facile ideal of one's forefathers; and for us now sluggishly to worship the old God would be equally idolatrous; we must stretch up now to the new, so making the stretch facile for our children: all which are not my own ungiven words, but Rivers'; let's go now to him."