The effect was electrical.  Neither sceptics nor devotees were prepared to abide the result of the experiment.  In vain did I urge the pious to trust in the accuracy of their deity’s aim with a thunderbolt, and the justice of his discrimination between the innocent and the guilty.  In vain did I appeal to the sceptics to accept the logical outcome of their scepticism:  it soon appeared that when thunderbolts were in question there were no sceptics.  Our host, seeing that his guests would vanish precipitately if the impious challenge were uttered, leaving him alone with a solitary infidel under sentence of extermination in five minutes, interposed and forbade the experiment, pleading at the same time for a change of subject.  I of course complied, but could not refrain from remarking that though the dreadful words had not been uttered, yet, as the thought had been formulated in my mind, it was very doubtful whether the consequences could be averted by sealing my lips.  However, the rest appeared to feel that the game would be played according to the rules, and that it mattered very little what I thought so long as I said nothing.  Only the leader of the evangelical party, I thought, was a little preoccupied until five minutes had elapsed and the weather was still calm.

IN QUEST OF THE FIRST CAUSE

Another reminiscence.  In those days we thought in terms of time and space, of cause and effect, as we still do; but we do not now demand from a religion that it shall explain the universe completely in terms of cause and effect, and present the world to us as a manufactured article and as the private property of its Manufacturer.  We did then.  We were invited to pity the delusion of certain heathens who held that the world is supported by an elephant who is supported by a tortoise.  Mahomet decided that the mountains are great weights to keep the world from being blown away into space.  But we refuted these orientals by asking triumphantly what the tortoise stands on?  Freethinkers asked which came first:  the owl or the egg.  Nobody thought of saying that the ultimate problem of existence, being clearly insoluble and even unthinkable on causation lines, could not be a causation problem.  To pious people this would have been flat atheism, because they assumed that God must be a Cause, and sometimes called him The Great First Cause, or, in still choicer language, The Primal Cause.  To the Rationalists it would have been a renunciation of reason.  Here and there a man would confess that he stood as with a dim lantern in a dense fog, and could see but a little way in any direction into infinity.  But he did not really believe that infinity was infinite or that the eternal was also sempiternal:  he assumed that all things, known and unknown, were caused.