"What was that?" I asked nervously.
Dan Spain laughed. "Wind," he replied, "wind through the trees. Lightning may strike us dead at any moment because of my blasphemous ambitions. That is why I live as a hermit—should God's lightning strike at me, there will be no complications through it hitting an innocent bystander. You are the first person who has spent a night under this roof with me. I am sorry to subject you to the danger, but you came without an invitation."
"But why," I asked, "do you want to write a blasphemous book? You are aware, I suppose, that it might be suppressed."
"In a country, the constitution of which guarantees freedom of speech and religious liberty, I grant the possibility."
"Then why," I persisted, "do you want to write it?"
"Because," said Spain, "I am tired of tempering the wind of truth to the lamb of stupidity. Must we so fear the anger of the childish mob, that we dare not deprive them of their fairy tales of ghosts and gobblins, lest they kick out the props of civilizations? Must we, who no longer bend the knees of the mind in spook idolatry nor shake with the ague of hell fear, pretend that science and religion have been reconciled and mumble incantations to a metaphysical essence instead of saying to a maternal God to open the windows of the sky and spill rain out of heaven? I want to write a blasphemous book because the gods who throttle human intelligence and block human progress have revealed their vulnerable spot—for they are the gods who fear laughter."
"But surely?" I said, "all that is old stuff—Ingersoll has been dead twenty years. Present day thinkers only smile indulgently when some handsome faced bucolic clergyman invades a metropolitan pulpit and gets the forgotten monkey argument into the headlines of the daily press. Modern philosophy has reconciled religion and science and shown that they hail from the same psychic origins."
"The dictionary has never been made a sacred book," returned Spain, "and I cannot try men for heresy who blaspheme it. If a man wishes to designate the emotions he experiences when gazing at the stars by the term 'religion' I cannot prevent him. My dictionary defines religion as 'a belief in binding the spirit of man to a supernatural being' and further includes the idea of duties and rites founded upon such belief. If that be religion the war between religion and science can never end. The particular battle ground may change from age to age; it may be concerned with the mobility of the sun, the origin of species or the immaculate conception...."
"Well what of it," I remarked, "those things are all relatively unimportant."
"True" said Spain, "they are, but science has a job in the future that is vastly important and religion stands in its way."