“You mean to infer that the brain cannot act without the influence of the soul?”

“Precisely!  If the hands on the telegraph dial will not respond to the electric battery, the telegram cannot be deciphered.  But it would be foolish to deny the existence of the electric battery because the dial is unsatisfactory!  In like manner, when, by physical incapacity, or inherited disease, the brain can no longer receive the impressions or electric messages of the Spirit, it is practically useless.  Yet the Spirit is there all the same, dumbly waiting for release and another chance of expansion.”

“Is this the way you account for idiocy and mania?” asked Alwyn incredulously.

“Most certainly; idiocy and mania always come from man’s interference with the laws of health and of nature—­never otherwise.  The Soul placed within us by the Creator is meant to be fostered by man’s unfettered Will; if man chooses to employ that unfettered Will in wrong directions, he has only himself to blame for the disastrous results that follow.  You may perhaps ask why God has thus left our wills unfettered:  the answer is simple—­that we may serve Him by choice and not by compulsion.  Among the myriad million worlds that acknowledge His goodness gladly and undoubtingly, why should He seek to force unwilling obedience from us castaways!”

“As we are on this subject,” said Alwyn, with a tinge of satire in his tone, “if you grant a God, and make Him out to be supreme Love, why in the name of His supposed inexhaustible beneficence should we be castaways at all?”

“Because in our overweening pride and egotism we have elected to be such,” replied Heliobas.  “As angels have fallen, so have we.  But we are not altogether castaways now, since this signal,” and he touched the cross on his breast, “shone in heaven.”

Alwyn shrugged his shoulders disdainfully.

“Pardon me,” he murmured coldly, “with every desire to respect your religious scruples, I really cannot, personally speaking, accept the tenets of a worn-out faith, which all the most intellectual minds of the day reject as mere ignorant superstition.  The carpenter’s son of Judea was no doubt a very estimable person,—­a socialist teacher whose doctrines were very excellent in theory but impossible of practice.  That there was anything divine about Him I utterly deny; and I confess I am surprised that you, a man of evident culture, do not seem to see the hollow absurdity of Christianity as a system of morals and civilization.  It is an ever-sprouting seed of discord and hatred between nations; it has served as a casus belli of the most fanatical and merciless character; it is answerable for whole seas of cruel and unnecessary bloodshed ...”