word through many idols.

"'Come,' I said, 'your town is terrible. Let me away into my mountain
again. You wish me to consider this world worthy of me; you offer me
its small things in exchange for my great thing. You have not even
small things to offer. Farewell!'

"'And what is your doctrine?' he said to me at parting. As if we had a
doctrine!

"'For you,' I said, 'the worship of the explained; for us the
remembrance of the inexplicable.'"

V. HIS CONVERSION

"'But your religion?' said the townsman. 'You spoke of your religion.
What do you mean by religion?'

"'Religion is to have charity: never to condemn, never to despair,
never to believe that the finite can ever quite cover up the infinite,
never to believe that anything is wholly explained, to see the
inexplicable in all things, and to remember that words are idols and
judgments are blasphemies. For words are the naming of things that are
without name, and judgments are the limiting of the wonder of God.
And what we call God is the inexplicable, the indefinable, the great
Unknown to whom in the midst of the idolatry of Athens an altar was
once erected.'

"'As a child I learnt that God was He who made the world in six days,'
said the townsman. 'God was He who delivered unto Moses the ten
commandments. Is not this the same which you profess?'

"'The same,' I answered. 'But you worship Him idolatrously. You limit
the wonder of God by words. You limit God's fruitfulness to six days:
and you say the world is finished and made. But for us the world is
never finished; every spring is a new creation, every day God adds or
takes away. And you limit God's laws to ten: you limit the Everlasting
Wisdom to ten words. Words are your idols, the bricks out of which
your idols and oracles are built. Listen, I will tell you what I have
always found in towns. I have found words worshipped as something holy
in themselves. Words were used to limit God, debase man. So is it in
your town. Once man thought words; now words are beginning to think
man. Once man conceived future progress; now your idol Progress is
beginning to conceive future man. It is the same as with money; once
man made money, but now in your idolatry money makes the man. Once man
entered commerce that he might have more life; now he enters life that
he may have more commerce. Of women, the very vessels and temples of
human life, you have made clerks; of priestesses unto the Living God
you have made vestals