“Yes,” I said, “I do not desire to return.  This is all too wonderful.  It is the freshness and sweetness of it all that comes home to me.  I do not desire to think of the body, and, strange to say, if I do think of it, the times that I remember gratefully are those when the body was faint and weary.  The old joys and triumphs, when one laughed and loved and exulted, seem to me to have something ugly about them, because one was content, and wished things to remain for ever as they were.  It was the longing for something different that helped me; the acquiescence was the shame.”

VI

One day I said to Amroth, “What a comfort it is to find that there is no religion here!”

“I know what you mean,” he said.  “I think it is one of the things that one wonders at most, to remember into how very small and narrow a thing religion was made, and how much that was religious was never supposed to be so.”

“Yes,” I said, “as I think of it now, it seems to have been a game played by a few players, a game with a great many rules.”

“Yes,” he said, “it was a game often enough; but of course the mischief of it was, that when it was most a game it most pretended to be something else—­to contain the secret of life and all knowledge.”

“I used to think,” I said, “that religion was like a noble and generous boy with the lyrical heart of a poet, made by some sad chance into a king, surrounded by obsequious respect and pomp and etiquette, bound by a hundred ceremonious rules, forbidden to do this and that, taught to think that his one duty was to be magnificently attired, to acquire graceful arts of posture and courtesy, subtly and gently prevented from obeying natural and simple impulses, made powerless—­a crowned slave; so that, instead of being the freest and sincerest thing in the world, it became the prisoner of respectability and convention, just a part of the social machine.”

“That was only one side of it,” said Amroth.  “It was often where it was least supposed to be.”

“Yes,” I said, “as far as I resent anything now, I resent the conversion of so much religion from an inspiring force into a repressive force.  One learnt as a child to think of it, not as a great moving flood of energy and joy, but as an awful power apart from life, rejoicing in petty restrictions, and mainly concerned with creating an unreal atmosphere of narrow piety, hostile to natural talk and laughter and freedom.  God’s aid was invoked, in childhood, mostly when one was naughty and disobedient, so that one grew to think of Him as grim, severe, irritable, anxious to interfere.  What wonder that one lost all wish to meet God and all natural desire to know Him!  One thought of Him as impossible to please except by behaving in a way in which it was not natural to behave; and one thought of religion as a stern and dreadful process going on somewhere, like a law-court or a prison, which one had to keep clear of if one could.  Yet I hardly see how, in the interests of discipline, it could have been avoided.  If only one could have begun at the other end!”