"As we are on this subject," said Alwyn, with a tinge of satire in his tone, "if you grant a God, and make Him out to be supreme Love, why in the name of His supposed inexhaustible beneficence should we be castaways at all?"
"Because in our overweening pride and egotism we have ELECTED to be such," replied Heliobas. "As angels have fallen, so have we. But we are not altogether castaways now, since this signal," and he touched the cross on his breast, "shone in heaven."
Alwyn shrugged his shoulders disdainfully.
"Pardon me," he murmured coldly, "with every desire to respect your religious scruples, I really cannot, personally speaking, accept the tenets of a worn-out faith, which all the most intellectual minds of the day reject as mere ignorant superstition. The carpenter's son of Judea was no doubt a very estimable person,—a socialist teacher whose doctrines were very excellent in theory but impossible of practice. That there was anything divine about Him I utterly deny; and I confess I am surprised that you, a man of evident culture, do not seem to see the hollow absurdity of Christianity as a system of morals and civilization. It is an ever-sprouting seed of discord and hatred between nations; it has served as a casus belli of the most fanatical and merciless character; it is answerable for whole seas of cruel and unnecessary bloodshed …"
"Have you nothing NEW to say on the subject?" interposed Heliobas, with a slight smile. "I have heard all this so often before, from divers kinds of men both educated and ignorant, who have a willful habit of forgetting all that Christ Himself prophesied concerning His creed of Self-renunciation, so difficult to selfish humanity: 'Think not that I come to send peace on the earth. I come, not to send peace, but a sword.' Again 'Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.' … 'all ye shall be offended because of me.' Such plain words as these seem utterly thrown away upon this present generation. And do you know I find a curious lack of originality among so-called 'freethinkers'; in fact their thoughts can hardly be designated as 'free' when they all run in such extremely narrow grooves of similitude—a flock of sheep mildly trotting under the guidance of the butcher to the slaughterhouse could not be more tamely alike in their bleating ignorance as to where they are going. Your opinions, for instance, differ scarce a whit from those of the common boor who, reading his penny Radical paper, thinks he can dispense with God, and talks of the 'carpenter's son of Judea' with the same easy flippancy and scant reverence as yourself. The 'intellectual minds of the day' to which you allude, are extraordinarily limited of comprehension, and none of them, literary or otherwise, have such a grasp of knowledge as any of these dead and gone authors," and he waved his hand toward the surrounding loaded bookshelves, "who lived centuries ago, and are now, as far as the general public is concerned, forgotten. All the volumes you see here are vellum manuscripts copied from the original slabs of baked clay, stone tablets, and engraved sheets of ivory, and among them is an ingenious treatise by one Remeni Adranos, chief astronomer to the then king of Babylonia, setting forth the Atom and Evolution theory with far more clearness and precision than any of your modern professors. All such propositions are old—old as the hills, I assure you; and these days in which you live are more suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of Shakespeare. In that land you,—who, according to your own showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and inspiration to still higher endeavor—you have been, poisoned by the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise and 'highly cultured' to believe in anything. It is a most unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes of national disease and downfall; it is difficult to breathe it without becoming fever-smitten; and in your denial of the divinity of Christ, I do not blame you any more than I would blame a poor creature struck down by a plague. You have caught the negative, agnostic, and atheistical infection from others,—it is not the natural, healthy condition of your temperament."
"On the contrary it IS, so far as that point goes," said Alwyn with sudden heat—"I tell you I am amazed,—utterly amazed, that you, with your intelligence, should uphold such a barbaric idea as the Divinity of Christ! Human reason revolts at it,—and after all, make as light of it as you will, reason is the only thing that exalts us a little above the level of the beasts."
"Nay—the beasts share the gift of reason in common with us," replied Heliobas, "and Man only proves his ignorance if he denies the fact. Often indeed the very insects show superior reasoning ability to ourselves, any thoroughly capable naturalist would bear me out in this assertion."
"Well, well!" and Alwyn grew impatient—"reason or no reason, I again repeat that the legend on which Christianity is founded is absurd and preposterous,—why, if there were a grain of truth in it, Judas Iscariot instead of being universally condemned, ought to be honored and canonized as the first of saints!"
"Must I remind you of your early lesson days?" asked Heliobas mildly. "You will find it written in a Book you appear to have forgotten, that Christ expressly prophesied, 'Woe to that man' by whom He was betrayed. I tell, you, little as you credit it, there is not a word that the Sinless One uttered while on this earth, that has not been or shall not be in time fulfilled. But I do not wish to enter into any controversies with you; you have told me your story,—I have heard it with interest,—and I may add with sympathy. You are a poet, struck dumb by Materialism because you lacked strength to resist the shock,—you would fain recover your singing-speech—and this is in truth the reason why you have come to me. You think that if you could gain some of the strange experiences which others have had while under my influence, you might win back your lost inspiration—though you do not know WHY you think this—neither do I—I can only guess."
"And your guess is…?" demanded Alwyn with an air of affected indifference.