d and
half-devil. Indeed, I remember no religion so non-moral--none that is so
baldly a mere mechanical device for meeting the primitive mind's need to
set its own tribe apart from all others--or in the later growth to
separate the sheep from the goats, by reason of the opinion formed of
certain evidence. Even schoolboys nowadays know that no moral value
inheres in any opinion formed upon evidence. Yet, I dare say it was
doubtless for a long period an excellent religion for marauding nations."

Or, again, after a long period of apparently rational talk, the
unfortunate young man would break out with, "And how childish its
wonder-tales were, of iron made to swim, of a rod turned to a serpent, of
a coin found in a fish's mouth, of devils asking to go into swine, of a
fig-tree cursed to death because it did not bear fruit out of season--how
childish that tale of a virgin mother, who conceived 'without sin,' as it
is somewhere naively put--an ideal of absolutely flawless falsity. Even
the great old painters were helpless before it. They were driven to make
mindless Madonnas, stupid bits of fleshy animality. It's not easy to
idealise mere physical motherhood. You see, that was the wrong, perverted
idea of motherhood--'conceiving without sin.' It's an unclean dogma in its
implications. I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus--a sort of
cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say
seems now to have a certain crude truth in it. He said: 'There's my old
mother, seventy-eight this spring, bent, gray, and wasted with the work of
raising us seven children; she's slaved so hard for fifty years that she's
worn her wedding-ring to a fine thread, and her hands look as if they had
a thousand knuckles and joints in them. But she smiles like a girl of
sixteen, she was never cross or bitter to one of us hounds, and I believe
she never even _wanted_ to complain in all her days. And there's a look of
noble capacity in her face, of soul dignity, that you never saw in any
Madonna's. I tell you no "virgin mother" could be as beautiful as my
mother, who bore seven children for love of my father and for love of the
thought of us.' Isn't it queer, sir, that I remember that--for it seemed
only grotesque at the time I heard it."

It was after this extraordinary speech, uttered with every sign of
physical soundness, that young Dr. Merritt confided to the old man when
they had left the study:

"He's coming on fine,