your logical
scheme."

"What are you talking about?" asked Lucifer. "What would happen?"

"I mean it would fall down," said the monk, looking wistfully into the
void.

Lucifer made an angry movement and opened his mouth to speak, but
Michael, with all his air of deliberation, was proceeding before he
could bring out a word.

"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening
monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this----"

"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the
ship.

"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all
unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory
of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by
refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck,
or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary
and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was
paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would
batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic
country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of
the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and
uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still
summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the
devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration
which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the
front of an interminable line of palings, when his eyes were opened. Not
a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change
in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses
linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick
and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path
he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling
is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal
madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the
cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung
himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike
things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture
because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made
of crosses. He was found in the river."