ght had been formulated in my mind, it was very doubtful whether
the consequences could be averted by sealing my lips. However, the rest
appeared to feel that the game would be played according to the rules,
and that it mattered very little what I thought so long as I said
nothing. Only the leader of the evangelical party, I thought, was a
little preoccupied until five minutes had elapsed and the weather was
still calm.

IN QUEST OF THE FIRST CAUSE

Another reminiscence. In those days we thought in terms of time and
space, of cause and effect, as we still do; but we do not now demand
from a religion that it shall explain the universe completely in terms
of cause and effect, and present the world to us as a manufactured
article and as the private property of its Manufacturer. We did then. We
were invited to pity the delusion of certain heathens who held that
the world is supported by an elephant who is supported by a tortoise.
Mahomet decided that the mountains are great weights to keep the world
from being blown away into space. But we refuted these orientals by
asking triumphantly what the tortoise stands on? Freethinkers asked
which came first: the owl or the egg. Nobody thought of saying that
the ultimate problem of existence, being clearly insoluble and even
unthinkable on causation lines, could not be a causation problem. To
pious people this would have been flat atheism, because they assumed
that God must be a Cause, and sometimes called him The Great First
Cause, or, in still choicer language, The Primal Cause. To the
Rationalists it would have been a renunciation of reason. Here and there
a man would confess that he stood as with a dim lantern in a dense fog,
and could see but a little way in any direction into infinity. But he
did not really believe that infinity was infinite or that the eternal
was also sempiternal: he assumed that all things, known and unknown,
were caused.

Hence it was that I found myself one day towards the end of the
eighteen-seventies in a cell in the old Brompton Oratory arguing with
Father Addis, who had been called by one of his flock to attempt my
conversion to Roman Catholicism. The universe exists, said the father:
somebody must have made it. If that somebody exists, said I, somebody
must have made him. I grant that for the sake of argument, said the
Oratorian. I grant you a maker of God. I grant you a maker of the maker
of God. I grant you as long a line of makers as you plea