CANTELUPE. [Suddenly congenial.] Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote I hope ... the modern ones have no flavour.  And you took all the adventures as seriously as the Don did?

TREBELL. [Not expecting this.] I forget.

CANTELUPE.  It’s the finer attitude ... the child’s attitude.  And it would enable you immediately to comprehend mine towards an education consisting merely of practical knowledge.  The life of Faith is still the happy one.  What is more crushingly finite than knowledge?  Moral discipline is a nation’s only safety.  How much of your science tends in support of the great spiritual doctrine of sacrifice!

      TREBELL returns to his subject as forceful as ever.

TREBELL.  The Church has assimilated much in her time.  Do you think it wise to leave agnostic science at the side of the plate?  I think, you know, that this craving for common knowledge is a new birth in the mind of man; and if your church won’t recognise that soon, by so much will she be losing her grip for ever over men’s minds.  What’s the test of godliness, but your power to receive the new idea in whatever form it comes and give it life?  It is blasphemy to pick and choose your good. [For a moment his thoughts seem to be elsewhere.] That’s an unhappy man or woman or nation ...  I know it if it has only come to me this minute ... and I don’t care what their brains or their riches or their beauty or any of their triumph may be ... they’re unhappy and useless if they can’t tell life from death.

CANTELUPE. [Interested in the digression] Remember that the Church’s claim has ever been to know that difference.

TREBELL. [Fastening to his subject again.] My point is this:  A man’s demand to know the exact structure of a fly’s wing, and his assertion that it degrades any child in the street not to know such a thing, is a religious revival ... a token of spiritual hunger.  What else can it be?  And we commercialise our teaching!

CANTELUPE.  I wouldn’t have it so.

TREBELL.  Then I’m offering you the foundation of a new Order of men and women who’ll serve God by teaching his children.  Now shall we finish the conversation in prose?

CANTELUPE. [Not to be put down.] What is the prose for God?

TREBELL. [Not to be put down either.] That’s what we irreligious people are giving our lives to discover. [He plunges into detail.] I’m proposing to found about seventy-two new colleges, and of course, to bring the ones there are up to the new standard.  Then we must gradually revise all teaching salaries in government schools ... to a scale I have in mind.  Then the course must be compulsory and the training time doubled—­

CANTELUPE.  Doubled!  Four years?

TREBELL.  Well, a minimum of three ... a university course.  Remember we’re turning a trade into a calling.

CANTELUPE.  There’s more to that than taking a degree.