be allowed to survive, taking its place with the feudal castles and walled cities of the Continent:  the joy of the American tourist, the text-book of the antiquary.  A pity!  Yes, but then from the aesthetic point of view it was a pity that the groves of ancient Greece had ever been cut down and replanted with currant bushes, their altars scattered; that the stones of the temples of Isis should have come to be the shelter of the fisher of the Nile; and the corn wave in the wind above the buried shrines of Mexico.  All these dead truths that from time to time had encumbered the living world.  Each in its turn had had to be cleared away.

And yet was it altogether a dead truth:  this passionate belief in a personal God who had ordered all things for the best:  who could be appealed to for comfort, for help?  Might it not be as good an explanation as any other of the mystery surrounding us?  It had been so universal.  She was not sure where, but somewhere she had come across an analogy that had strongly impressed her.  “The fact that a man feels thirsty—­though at the time he may be wandering through the Desert of Sahara—­proves that somewhere in the world there is water.”  Might not the success of Christianity in responding to human needs be evidence in its favour?  The Love of God, the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, the Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  Were not all human needs provided for in that one comprehensive promise:  the desperate need of man to be convinced that behind all the seeming muddle was a loving hand guiding towards good; the need of the soul in its loneliness for fellowship, for strengthening; the need of man in his weakness for the kindly grace of human sympathy, of human example.

And then, as fate would have it, the first lesson happened to be the story of Jonah and the whale.  Half a dozen shocked faces turned suddenly towards her told Joan that at some point in the thrilling history she must unconsciously have laughed.  Fortunately she was alone in the pew, and feeling herself scarlet, squeezed herself into its farthest corner and drew down her veil.

No, it would have to go.  A religion that solemnly demanded of grown men and women in the twentieth century that they should sit and listen with reverential awe to a prehistoric edition of “Grimm’s Fairy Stories,” including Noah and his ark, the adventures of Samson and Delilah, the conversations between Balaam and his ass, and culminating in what if it were not so appallingly wicked an idea would be the most comical of them all:  the conception of an elaborately organized Hell, into which the God of the Christians plunged his creatures for all eternity!  Of what use was such a religion as that going to be to the world of the future?