They oughtn't, thought Ivy, rather indignantly, to laugh at her father's sermon when he wasn't meaning to be funny. If he saw he would be hurt. One shouldn't laugh in church, anyhow; even Jane and John knew that. These people were no better than Jelly.
"This Sunday," continued the Vicar, his last star journey safely accomplished, "is the day that has been set aside by our country for prayer and sermons with regard to the proposed increase in the national brain-power. This is, indeed, a sore need: but let us start on the firm foundation of religion. What is wisdom apart from that? Nothing but vanity and emptiness. What is the clever godless man but a fool from the point of view of eternity? What is the godly fool but a heavenly success?" ("He's talking sedition," whispered Kitty to Prideaux. "He'd better have stuck to the trains.")
But, of course, the vicar continued, if one can combine virtue and intelligence, so much the better. It has been done. There was, e.g. Darwin. Also General Gordon, St. Paul, and Lord Roberts, who had said with his last breath, in June, 1915, "We've got the men, we've got the money, we've got the munitions; what we now want is a nation on its knees." (Ivy saw Prideaux sit up very straight, as if he would have liked to inform Mr. Delmer that this libel on a dying soldier had long since been challenged and withdrawn.) One can, said the vicar, find many more such examples of this happy combination of virtue and intelligence. There was Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and Lord Rhondda (who in the dark days of famine had led the way in self-denial). Not, unfortunately, the Emperor Napoleon, Friedrich Nietzsche, or the Kaiser Wilhelm II. The good are not always the clever, nor the clever always the good. Some are neither, like the late Crown Prince of Germany (who was now sharing a small island in the Pacific with the Kaiser Wilhelm and MM. Lenin and Trotzky, late of Petrograd, and neither stupid nor exactly, let us hope, bad, but singularly unfortunate and misguided, like so many Russians, whom it is not for us to judge).
But we should try to be both intelligent and good. We should take every step in our power to improve our minds. (Prideaux began to look more satisfied; this was what sermons to-day ought to be about.) It is our duty to our country to be intelligent citizens, if we can, said the vicar. Reason is what God has differentiated us from the lower animals by. They have instinct, we reason. Truly a noble heritage. We are rather clever already; we have discovered fire, electricity, coal, and invented printing, steam engines, and flying. No reason why we should not improve our minds further still, and invent (under God) more things yet. Only one thing we must affirm; the State should be very careful how it interferes with the domestic lives of its citizens. The State was going rather far in that direction; it savoured unpleasantly of Socialism, a tyranny to which Englishmen did not take kindly. An Englishman's home had always been his castle (even castles, thought some aggrieved members of the congregation, were subject to unpleasant supervision by the police during food scarcity). No race was before us in its respect for law, but also no race was more determined that their personal and domestic relations should not be tampered with. When the State endeavoured to set up a Directorate of Matrimony, and penalised those who did not conform to its regulations, the State was, said the vicar, going too far, even for a State. The old school of laissez-faire, long since discredited as an economic theory, survived as regards the private lives of citizens. It is not the State which has ordained marriage, it is God, and God did not say "Only marry the clever; have no children but clever ones." He said, speaking through the inspired mouth of the writer of the book of Genesis, "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." ("And, through the inspired mouth of Solomon, 'Desire not a multitude of unprofitable children,'" murmured Anthony Grammont, who knew his Bible in patches, but was apt to get the authorship wrong.)
The vicar said he was now going to say a bold thing; if it brought him within reach of the law he could not help it. He considered that we ought all, in this matter, to be what are called Conscientious Obstructionists; we ought to protest against this interference, and refuse to pay the taxes levied upon those less intelligent infants sent to us by heaven. He did not say this without much thought and prayer, and it was, of course, a matter for everyone's own conscience, but he felt constrained to bear his witness on this question.
This came to Ivy as a shock. She had not known that her father was going to bear his witness this morning. She watched Prideaux's face with some anxiety. She admired and feared Prideaux, and thought how angry he must be. Not Miss Grammont; Miss Grammont didn't take these things quite seriously enough to be angry. Ivy sometimes suspected that the whole work of the Ministry of Brains, and, indeed, of every other Ministry, was a joke to her.
It was a relief to Ivy when her father finished his sermon on a more loyal note, by an urgent exhortation to everyone to go in for the Mind Training Course. We must not be backward, he said, in obeying our country in this righteous cause. He, for his part, intended to go in for it, with his household (Mrs. Delmer looked resigned but a little worried, as if she was mentally fitting in the Mind Training Course with all the other things she had to do, and finding it a close fit) and he hoped everyone in the congregation would do the same. Ivy saw Prideaux's profile become more approving. Perhaps her father had retrieved his reputation for patriotism after all. Anyhow at this point the And Now brought them all to their feet, they sang a hymn (the official hymn composed and issued by the Brains Ministry), had a collection (for the education of imbeciles), a prayer for the enlightenment of dark minds (which perhaps meant the same), and trooped out of church.
3
"He ought, of course," said Prideaux at lunch, "to be reported and prosecuted for propaganda contrary to the national interest. But we won't report him; he redeemed himself by his patriotic finish."
"He is redeemed for evermore by his express train," said Kitty.