“I pushed many priests aside; I thrust my sword through many idols.

“‘Come,’ I said, ’your town is terrible.  Let me away into my mountain again.  You wish me to consider this world worthy of me; you offer me its small things in exchange for my great thing.  You have not even small things to offer.  Farewell!’

“‘And what is your doctrine?’ he said to me at parting.  As if we had a doctrine!

“‘For you,’ I said, ’the worship of the explained; for us the remembrance of the inexplicable.’”

V. HIS CONVERSION

“‘But your religion?’ said the townsman.  ’You spoke of your religion.  What do you mean by religion?’

“’Religion is to have charity:  never to condemn, never to despair, never to believe that the finite can ever quite cover up the infinite, never to believe that anything is wholly explained, to see the inexplicable in all things, and to remember that words are idols and judgments are blasphemies.  For words are the naming of things that are without name, and judgments are the limiting of the wonder of God.  And what we call God is the inexplicable, the indefinable, the great Unknown to whom in the midst of the idolatry of Athens an altar was once erected.’

“‘As a child I learnt that God was He who made the world in six days,’ said the townsman.  ’God was He who delivered unto Moses the ten commandments.  Is not this the same which you profess?’

“‘The same,’ I answered.  ’But you worship Him idolatrously.  You limit the wonder of God by words.  You limit God’s fruitfulness to six days:  and you say the world is finished and made.  But for us the world is never finished; every spring is a new creation, every day God adds or takes away.  And you limit God’s laws to ten:  you limit the Everlasting Wisdom to ten words.  Words are your idols, the bricks out of which your idols and oracles are built.  Listen, I will tell you what I have always found in towns.  I have found words worshipped as something holy in themselves.  Words were used to limit God, debase man.  So is it in your town.  Once man thought words; now words are beginning to think man.  Once man conceived future progress; now your idol Progress is beginning to conceive future man.  It is the same as with money; once man made money, but now in your idolatry money makes the man.  Once man entered commerce that he might have more life; now he enters life that he may have more commerce.  Of women, the very vessels and temples of human life, you have made clerks; of priestesses unto the Living God you have made vestals of the dead gold calf.  You have insulted the dignity of man.’

“I waited, but the townsman was silent.

“‘Is that not so?’ I urged.

“’You have your point of view; we have ours.  You have your religion and we ours,’ said the townsman obstinately.  ’And you use words, do you not?  You have your terminology; you have your idols, just as we have.  If not, then how do you use your words?’