poetry and the love of beauty, and the gentle, spiritual, soulful life.
The Greeks had it; and Christianity would have had it too, if it hadn't
been for those brutes they call the Fathers. They loved ugliness and
dirt and the thought of hell-fire. They hated women. In all the earlier
stages of the Church, women were very prominent in it. Jesus himself
appreciated women, and delighted to have them about him, and talk with
them and listen to them. That was the very essence of the Greek spirit;
and it breathed into Christianity at its birth a sweetness and a grace
which twenty generations of cranks and savages like Paul and Jerome
and Tertullian weren't able to extinguish. But the very man, Cyril, who
killed Hypatia, and thus began the dark ages, unwittingly did another
thing which makes one almost forgive him. To please the Egyptians, he
secured the Church's acceptance of the adoration of the Virgin. It is
that idea which has kept the Greek spirit alive, and grown and grown,
till at last it will rule the world. It was only epileptic Jews who
could imagine a religion without sex in it."

"I remember the pictures of the Virgin in your room," said Theron,
feeling more himself again. "I wondered if they quite went with the
statues."

The remark won a smile from Celia's lips.

"They get along together better than you suppose," she answered.
"Besides, they are not all pictures of Mary. One of them, standing on
the moon, is of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms. Another might as
well be Mahamie, bearing the miraculously born Buddha, or Olympias with
her child Alexander, or even Perictione holding her babe Plato--all
these were similar cases, you know. Almost every religion had its
Immaculate Conception. What does it all come to, except to show us that