"There isn't so much difference as you think," said Father Forbes,
dispassionately. "Your people keep examining their souls, just as
children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there
any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone,
once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell
governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once
before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn't
new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in
races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands
of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are
concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous
wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire.
They have always been like that."

"What nonsense!" cried Celia. "I have no patience with such gloomy
rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and
light-heartedness, and they weren't frightened of death at all. They
made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their
greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of
suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of
these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it
was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought
in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament,
and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church,
that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are,
troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in
their churches by skulls and crossbones."

"My dear Celia," interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, "we
will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo