“Do you know England well?” asked Mr. Heard.

“Very little.  I have spent a few days in Liverpool and London, here and there, on my periodical journeyings to the States.  Kind friends supply me with English books and papers; the excellent Sir Herbert Street sends me more than I can possibly digest!  I confess that much of what I read was an enigma to me till I had studied the Bible.  Its teachings seem to have filtered, warm and fluid, through the veins of your national and private life.  Then, slowly, they froze hard, congealing the whole body into a kind of crystal.  Your ethics are stereotyped in black-letter characters.  A gargoyle morality.”

“It is certainly difficult,” said Mr. van Koppen, “for an Anglo-Saxon to appraise this book objectively.  His mind has been saturated with it in childhood to such an extent as to take on a definite bias.”

“Like the ancients with their Iliad.  Where is a truer poet than Homer?  Yet the worship of him became a positive bane to independent creative thought.  What good things could be written about the withering influence of Homer upon the intellectual life of Rome!”

The bishop asked: 

“You think the Bible has done the same for us?”

“I think it accounts for some Byzantine traits in your national character and for the formlessness and hesitancy which I, at least, seem to detect in the demeanour of many individual Anglo-Saxons.  They realize that their traditional upbringing is opposed to truth.  It gives them a sense of insecurity.  It makes them shy and awkward.  Poise!  That is what they need, and what this unbalanced Eastern stuff will never give them.”

“The withering influences of Homer:  surely that is a bad sign?” asked the American.

“And that of the Bible?” added Mr. Heard.

“How shall a plant survive, save by withering now and then?  If the ancients had not exhausted themselves with Homer, the soil might not have been ready for our Renaissance.  A bad sign?  Who can tell!  Good and bad—­I question whether these are respectable words to use.”

“You are content, as you observed before, to establish a fact?”

“Amply content.  I leave the rest to the academicians.  And the only fact we seem to have established is that your notions of morality resemble my notions of beauty in this one point:  neither of them are up to date.  You will have be admire a steam-engine.  Why?  Because of its delicately adjusted mechanism, its perfect adaptation to modern needs.  So be it.  I will modify my conception of what is fair in appearance.  I will admire your steam-engine, and thereby bring my ideals of beauty up to date.  Will you modify your conception of what is fair in conduct?  Will you admire something more adapted to modern needs than those intemperate Hebrew doctrines; something with more delicately adjusted mechanism?  The mendicant friar, that flower of Oriental ethics—­he is not up to date.  He resembles all Semites.  He lacks self-respect.  He apologizes for being alive.  It is not pretty—­to apologize for being alive!”