I point out to her the dressed-up commotion below us, and make some bitter remark on the folly of these people who vainly gather in the church, and go to pray there, to talk all alone.  Some of them believe; and the rest say to them, “I do the same as you.”

Marie does not argue the basis of religion.  “Ah,” she says, “I’ve never thought clearly about it, never.  They’ve always spoken of God to me, and I’ve always believed in Him.  But—­I don’t know.  I only know one thing,” she adds, her blue eyes looking at me, “and that is that there must be delusion.  The people must have religion, so as to put up with the hardships of life, the sacrifices——­”

She goes on again at once, more emphatically, “There must be religion for the unhappy, so that they won’t give way.  It may be foolishness, but if you take that away from them, what have they left?”

The gentle woman—­the normal woman of settled habits—­whom I had left here repeats, “There must be illusion.”  She sticks to this idea, she insists, she is taking the side of the unhappy.  Perhaps she talks like that for her own sake, and perhaps only because she is compassionate for me.

I said in vain, “No—­there must never be delusion, never fallacies.  There should be no more lies.  We shall not know then where we’re going.”

She persists and makes signs of dissent.

I say no more, tired.  But I do not lower my gaze before the all-powerful surroundings of circumstance.  My eyes are pitiless, and cannot help descrying the false God and the false priests everywhere.

We go down the footpath and return in silence.  But it seems to me that the rule of evil is hidden in easy security among the illusions which they heap up over us.  I am nothing; I am no more than I was before, but I am applying my hunger for the truth.  I tell myself again that there is no supernatural power, that nothing has fallen from the sky; that everything is within us and in our hands.  And in the inspiration of that faith my eyes embrace the magnificence of the empty sky, the abounding desert of the earth, the Paradise of the Possible.

We pass along the base of the church.  Marie says to me—­as if nothing had just been said, “Look how the poor church was damaged by a bomb from an aeroplane—­all one side of the steeple gone.  The good old vicar was quite ill about it.  As soon as he got up he did nothing else but try to raise money to have his dear steeple built up again; and he got it.”

People are revolving round the building and measuring its yawning mutilation with their eyes.  My thoughts turn to all these passers-by and to all those who will pass by, whom I shall not see, and to other wounded steeples.  The most beautiful of all voices echoes within me, and I would fain make use of it for this entreaty, “Build not the churches again!  You who will come after us, you who, in the sharp distinctness of the ended deluge will perhaps be able