“‘For God so loved the world’”—­but he was interrupted by the vivacious one on the couch.

“That’s it—­I remember that tradition.  He was even crude enough to beget a son for human sacrifice, giving that son power to condemn thereafter those who should not detect his godship through his human envelope!  That was a rather subtler bit of baseness than those he first perpetrated—­to send this saving son in such guise that the majority of his creatures would inevitably reject him!  Oh! he was bound to have his failures and his tortures, wasn’t he?  You know, I dare say the ancient Christians called him good because they were afraid to call him bad.  Doubtless the one great spiritual advance that we have made since the Christian faith prevailed is, that we now worship without fearing what we worship.”

Once more the distressed old man had risen to stand with assumed carelessness by the door, having writhed miserably in his chair until he could no longer endure the profane flood.

“But, truly, that god was, after all, a pathetic figure.  Imagine him amid the ruins of his plan, desolate, always foiled by his creatures—­meeting failure after failure from Eden to Calvary—­for even the bloody expedient of sending his son to be sacrificed did not avail to save his own chosen people.  They unanimously rejected the son, if I remember, and so he had to be content with a handful of the despised Gentiles.  A sorrowful old figure of futility he is—­a fine figure for a big epic, it seems to me.  By the way, what was the date that this religion was laughed away.  I can remember perfectly the downfall of the Homeric deities—­how many years there were when the common people believed in the divine origin of the Odyssey, while the educated classes were more or less discreetly heretical, until at last the whole Olympian outfit became poetic myths.  But strangely enough I do not recall just the date when we began to demand a god of dignity and morality.”

The old man had been loath to leave the sufferer.  He still stood by the open door to call to the first passer-by.  Now, shudderingly wishful to stem the torrent of blasphemies, innocent though they were, he ventured cautiously: 

“There was Sinai—­you forget the tables—­the moral law—­the ten commandments.”

“Sinai, to be sure.  Christians used to regard that as an occasion of considerable dignity, didn’t they?  The time when he gave directions about slavery and divorce and polygamy—­he was beautifully broad-minded in all those matters, and to kill witches and to stone an ox that gored any one, and how to disembowel the lambs used for sacrifice, and what colours to use in the tabernacle.”

But the horrified old man had fled.  Half an hour later he returned with Dr. Merritt, relieving Clytie, who had watched outside the door and who reported that there had been no signs of violence within.

Again they found a normal pulse and temperature, and an appetite clamouring for delicacies of strong meat.  Young Dr. Merritt was greatly puzzled.