"There's no blood in your veins," said Christophe. "And on top of that, all sorts of Christian ideas!… Your religious education in France is reduced to the Catechism: the emasculate Gospel, the tame, boneless New Testament…. Humanitarian clap-trap, always tearful…. And the Revolution, Jean-Jacques, Robespierre, '48, and, on top of that, the Jews!… Take a dose of the full-blooded Old Testament every morning."
Olivier protested. He had a natural antipathy for the Old Testament, a feeling which dated back to his childhood, when he used secretly to pore over an illustrated Bible, which had been in the library at home, where it was never read, and the children were even forbidden to open it. The prohibition was useless! Olivier could never keep the book open for long. He used quickly to grow irritated and saddened by it, and then he would close it: and he would find consolation in plunging into the Iliad, or the Odyssey, or the Arabian Nights.
"The gods of the Iliad are men, beautiful, mighty, vicious: I can understand them," said Olivier. "I like them or dislike them: even when I dislike them I still love them: I am in love with them. More than once, with Patroclus, I have kissed the lovely feet of Achilles as he lay bleeding. But the God of the Bible is an old Jew, a maniac, a monomaniac, a raging madman, who spends his time in growling and hurling threats, and howling like an angry wolf, raving to himself in the confinement of that cloud of his. I don't understand him. I don't love him; his perpetual curses make my head ache, and his savagery fills me with horror:
"The burden of Moab….
"The burden of Damascus….
"The burden of Babylon….
"The burden of Egypt….
"The burden of the desert of the sea….
"The burden of the valley of vision….
"He is a lunatic who thinks himself judge, public prosecutor, and executioner rolled into one, and, even in the courtyard of his prison, he pronounces sentence of death on the flowers and the pebbles. One is stupefied by the tenacity of his hatred, which fills the book with bloody cries …—'a cry of destruction,… the cry is gone round about the borders of Moab: the howling thereof unto Eglaim, and the howling thereof unto Beerelim….'