mple, that an unchristened
infant goes wailing forth from the threshold of life into an eternity
of punishment? Look me in the face, you father of six! No, of
course you don't believe it. Nobody does. And the difference is not
that religion has ceased to teach it--for it hasn't--but that men
have grown decent and put it, with like doctrines, silently aside in
disgust. So it has happened to Satan and his fork: they have become
'old hat.' So it will happen to all the old machinery of hell: the
operating decency of human nature will grow ashamed of it--that is
all . . . Why, if you look into men's ordinary daily conduct--which
is the only true test--they _never_ believed in such things. Do you
suppose that the most frantic Scotch Calvinist, when he was his douce
daily self and not temporarily intoxicated by his creed, ever treated
his neighbours in practice as men predestined to damnation?
Of course he didn't!"

"But religion," objected Mr. Simeon, "lifts a man out of himself--his
daily self, as you call it."

"It does that, by Jove!" Brother Copas felt for his snuff-box.
"Why, what else was I arguing?"

"And," pursued Mr. Simeon, his voice gaining assurance as it happened
on a form of words he had learnt from somebody else, "the efficacy of
religion is surely just here, that it lifts the individual man out of
his personality and wings him towards Abba, the all-fatherly--as I
heard it said the other day," he added lamely.

"Good Lord!"--Brother Copas eyed him over a pinch. "You must
have been keeping pretty bad company, lately. Who is it? . . .
That sounds a trifle too florid even for Colt--the sort of thing Colt
would achieve if he could . . . Upon my word, I believe you must have
been sitting under Tarbolt!"

Mr. Simeon blushed guiltily to the eyes. But it was ever the
mischief with Brother Copas's worldly scent that he overran it on the
stronger scent of an argument.

"But it's precisely a working daily religion, a religion that
belongs to a man when he _is_ himself, that I'm after," he ran on.
"You fellows hold that a sound religious life will ensure you an
eternity of bliss at the end. Very well. You fellows know that the
years of a man's life are, roughly, threescore and ten. (Actually it
works out far below that figure, but I make you a present of the
difference.) Very well again. I take any average Christian aged
forty-five, and what sort of premium do I observe him paying--I won't
say on a