第96章

Theron, much mystified, nodded his head.Could it be possible--was there coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert? "Yes--I know," he murmured.

"But I should explain that I am only a Catholic in the sense that its symbolism is pleasant to me.You remember what Schopenhauer said--you cannot have the water by itself:

you must also have the jug that it is in.Very well;the Catholic religion is my jug.I put into it the things I like.They were all there long ago, thousands of years ago.

The Jews threw them out; we will put them back again.

We will restore art and poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't been for those brutes they call the Fathers.

They loved ugliness and dirt and the thought of hell-fire.

They hated women.In all the earlier stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it.Jesus himself appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with them and listen to them.That was the very essence of the Greek spirit; and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish.

But the very man, Cyril, who killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another thing which makes one almost forgive him.To please the Egyptians, he secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin.

It is that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown, till at last it will rule the world.

It was only epileptic Jews who could imagine a religion without sex in it.""I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room,"said Theron, feeling more himself again."I wondered if they quite went with the statues."The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.

"They get along together better than you suppose,"she answered."Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary.

One of them, standing on the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms.Another might as well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all these were similar cases, you know.

Almost every religion had its Immaculate Conception.

What does it all come to, except to show us that man turns naturally toward the worship of the maternal idea?

That is the deepest of all our instincts--love of woman, who is at once daughter and wife and mother.It is that that makes the world go round."Brave thoughts shaped themselves in Theron's mind, and shone forth in a confident yet wistful smile on his face.

"lt is a pity you cannot change estates with me for one minute,"he said, in steady, low tone."Then you would realize the tremendous truth of what you have been saying.

It is only your intellect that has reached out and grasped the idea.If you were in my place, you would discover that your heart was bursting with it as well."Celia turned and looked at him.

"I myself," he went on, "would not have known, half an hour ago, what you meant by the worship of the maternal idea.

I am much older than you.I am a strong, mature man.

But when I lay down there, and shut my eyes--because the charm and marvel of this whole experience had for the moment overcome me--the strangest sensation seized upon me.