ly readers now except the reluctant
parsons at the church lecterns, who communicate their discomfort to the
congregation by gargling the words in their throats in an unnatural
manner that is as repulsive as it is unintelligible. And this is because
the imposition of the legends as literal truths at once changes them
from parables into falsehoods. The feeling against the Bible has become
so strong at last that educated people not only refuse to outrage their
intellectual consciences by reading the legend of Noah's Ark, with its
funny beginning about the animals and its exquisite end about the birds:
they will not read even the chronicles of King David, which may
very well be true, and are certainly more candid than the official
biographies of our contemporary monarchs.

WHAT TO DO WITH THE LEGENDS

What we should do, then, is to pool our legends and make a delightful
stock of religious folk-lore on an honest basis for all mankind. With
our minds freed from pretence and falsehood we could enter into the
heritage of all the faiths. China would share her sages with Spain, and
Spain her saints with China. The Ulster man who now gives his son an
unmerciful thrashing if the boy is so tactless as to ask how the evening
and the morning could be the first day before the sun was created, or
to betray an innocent calf-love for the Virgin Mary, would buy him a
bookful of legends of the creation and of mothers of God from all parts
of the world, and be very glad to find his laddie as interested in such
things as in marbles or Police and Robbers. That would be better
than beating all good feeling towards religion out of the child, and
blackening his mind by teaching him that the worshippers of the holy
virgins, whether of the Parthenon or St Peter's, are fire-doomed
heathens and idolaters. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to
the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their
fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither
intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and
the teachers teach in vain. And nothing stands between the people and
the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal
truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction.

A LESSON FROM SCIENCE TO THE CHURCHES

Let the Churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the
dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas
of religion. It is not tha