“There isn’t so much difference as you think,” said Father Forbes, dispassionately.  “Your people keep examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet.  Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism.  But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike.  As I remember saying to you once before, there is really nothing new under the sun.  Even the saying isn’t new.  Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much.  Where religions are concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.  They have always been like that.”

“What nonsense!” cried Celia.  “I have no patience with such gloomy rubbish.  The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they weren’t frightened of death at all.  They made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down.  Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life.  Our own early Church was full of these broad and beautiful Greek ideas.  You know that yourself!  And it was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament, and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones.”

“My dear Celia,” interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, “we will have no Greek debate today.  Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks.  Look at those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer.  What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them?  I take it, Mr. Ware,” he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, “that what we are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the destiny of the entire American people.  You see those young Irishmen there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer.  That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa.  The Kelt has come to grief heretofore—­or at least been forced to play second fiddle to other races—­because he lacked the right sort of a drink.  He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities.  It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments.  When you add whiskey