“What would happen if we applied asceticism or a tired, discouraged unbelief to having children that we do to having pounds and pence and dollars and cents?  You would not stand for that would you?”

I looked at his five sons.

“Suppose all the good families of to-day were to take the ground that having children is a self-indulgence unworthy of good people; suppose the good people leave having children in this world almost entirely to bad ones?

“This is what has been happening to money.

“Unbelief in money is unbelief in the spirit.  It is paying too much attention to wealth to say that one must or that one must not have it.”

I cannot recall precisely what was said after this in that long evening talk of ours but what I tried to say perhaps might have been something like this: 

The essence of the New Testament seems to be the emphasis of a man’s spirit with or without money.  Whether a man should be rich or get out of being rich and earn the right to be poor (which some very true and big men, artists and inventors in this world will always prefer) turns on a man’s temperament.  If a man has a money genius and can so handle money that he can make money, and if he can, at the same time, and all in one bargain, express his own spirit, if he can free the spirits of other men with money and express his religion in it, he should be ostracized by all thoughtful, Christian people, if in the desperate crisis of an age like this, he tries to get out of being rich.

The one thing a man can be said to be for in this world, is to express the goodness—­the religion in him, in something, and if he is not the kind of man who can express his religion in money and in employing labour, then let him find something—­say music or radium or painting in which he can.  It is this bounding off in a world, this making a bare spot in life and saying “This is not God, this cannot be God!”—­it is this alone that is sacriligious.

* * * * *

It may be that I am merely speaking for myself, but I did discover a man on Fleet Street the other day who quite agreed with me apparently, that if the thing a man has in him is religion he can put it up or express it in almost anything.

This man had tried to express his idea in a window.

He had done a Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” in sugar—­a kind of bas-relief in sugar.

I do not claim that this kind of foolish, helpless caricature of a great spiritual truth filled me with a great reverence or that it does now.

But it did make me think how things were.

If sugar with this man, like money with a banker, was the one logical thing the man had to express his religion in, or if what he had had to express had been really true and fine, or if there had been a true or fine or great man to express, I do not doubt sugar could have been made to do it.