In the Days of the Comet Read online

  Section 4

  "I MUST be going," I said, with a curiously reinforced desire toget away out of that room.

  "My dear chap!" he insisted, "I can't think of it. Surely--there'snothing to call you away." Then with an evident desire to shift thevenue of our talk, he asked, "You never told me what you thoughtof Burble's little book."

  I was now, beneath my dull display of submission, furiously angrywith him. It occurred to me to ask myself why I should deferand qualify my opinions to him. Why should I pretend a feelingof intellectual and social inferiority toward him. He asked whatI thought of Burble. I resolved to tell him--if necessary witharrogance. Then perhaps he would release me. I did not sit downagain, but stood by the corner of the fireplace.

  "That was the little book you lent me last summer?" I said.

  "He reasons closely, eh?" he said, and indicated the armchair witha flat hand, and beamed persuasively.

  I remained standing. "I didn't think much of his reasoning powers,"I said.

  "He was one of the cleverest bishops London ever had."

  "That may be. But he was dodging about in a jolly feeble case,"said I.

  "You mean?"

  "That he's wrong. I don't think he proves his case. I don't thinkChristianity is true. He knows himself for the pretender he is.His reasoning's--Rot."

  Mr. Gabbitas went, I think, a shade paler than his wont, and propitiationvanished from his manner. His eyes and mouth were round, his faceseemed to get round, his eyebrows curved at my remarks.

  "I'm sorry you think that," he said at last, with a catch in hisbreath.

  He did not repeat his suggestion that I should sit. He made a stepor two toward the window and turned. "I suppose you will admit--" hebegan, with a faintly irritating note of intellectual condescension.. . . .

  I will not tell you of his arguments or mine. You will find ifyou care to look for them, in out-of-the-way corners of our bookmuseums, the shriveled cheap publications--the publications of theRationalist Press Association, for example--on which my argumentswere based. Lying in that curious limbo with them, mixed up withthem and indistinguishable, are the endless "Replies" of orthodoxy,like the mixed dead in some hard-fought trench. All those disputesof our fathers, and they were sometimes furious disputes, havegone now beyond the range of comprehension. You younger people, Iknow, read them with impatient perplexity. You cannot understandhow sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at allin most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematicthinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, havefollowed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskinmagic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You canno more understand our theological passions than you can understandthe fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods onlyby circumlocutions, that made savages pine away and die becausethey had been photographed, or an Elizabethan farmer turn back froma day's expedition because he had met three crows. Even I, who havebeen through it all, recall our controversies now with somethingnear incredulity.

  Faith we can understand to-day, all men live by faith, but in theold time every one confused quite hopelessly Faith and a forced,incredible Belief in certain pseudo-concrete statements. I aminclined to say that neither believers nor unbelievers had faith aswe understand it--they had insufficient intellectual power. Theycould not trust unless they had something to see and touch andsay, like their barbarous ancestors who could not make a bargainwithout exchange of tokens. If they no longer worshipped stocks andstones, or eked out their needs with pilgrimages and images, theystill held fiercely to audible images, to printed words and formulae.

  But why revive the echoes of the ancient logomachies?

  Suffice it that we lost our tempers very readily in pursuit ofGod and Truth, and said exquisitely foolish things on either side.And on the whole--from the impartial perspective of my three andseventy years--I adjudicate that if my dialectic was bad, that ofthe Rev. Gabbitas was altogether worse.

  Little pink spots came into his cheeks, a squealing note into hisvoice. We interrupted each other more and more rudely. We inventedfacts and appealed to authorities whose names I mispronounced;and, finding Gabbitas shy of the higher criticism and the Germans,I used the names of Karl Marx and Engels as Bible exegetes with nolittle effect. A silly wrangle! a preposterous wrangle!--you mustimagine our talk becoming louder, with a developing quarrelsomenote--my mother no doubt hovering on the staircase and listeningin alarm as who should say, "My dear, don't offend it! Oh, don'toffend it! Mr. Gabbitas enjoys its friendship. Try to think whateverMr. Gabbitas says"--though we still kept in touch with a pretenceof mutual deference. The ethical superiority of Christianity toall other religions came to the fore--I know not how. We dealt withthe matter in bold, imaginative generalizations, because of theinsufficiency of our historical knowledge. I was moved to denounceChristianity as the ethic of slaves, and declare myself a discipleof a German writer of no little vogue in those days, named Nietzsche.

  For a disciple I must confess I was particularly ill acquaintedwith the works of the master. Indeed, all I knew of him had cometo me through a two-column article in The Clarion for the previousweek. . . . But the Rev. Gabbitas did not read The Clarion.

  I am, I know, putting a strain upon your credulity when I tell youthat I now have little doubt that the Rev. Gabbitas was absolutelyignorant even of the name of Nietzsche, although that writer presenteda separate and distinct attitude of attack upon the faith that wasin the reverend gentleman's keeping.

  "I'm a disciple of Nietzsche," said I, with an air of extensiveexplanation.

  He shied away so awkwardly at the name that I repeated it at once.

  "But do you know what Nietzsche says?" I pressed him viciously.

  "He has certainly been adequately answered," said he, still tryingto carry it off.

  "Who by?" I rapped out hotly. "Tell me that!" and became mercilesslyexpectant.