"Is--is this friend of yours--Mr. Hoover--in good health?"

"Fine--weighs a hundred and eighty. He and I have a ranch on the
Wimmenuche--only Hoover's been doing most of the work while I thought
about things. I see that. Hoover says one can't do much for the world
but laugh at it. He has a theory of his own. He maintains that God set
this planet whirling, then turned away for a moment to start another
universe or something. He says that when the Creator glances back at us
again, to find this poor, scrubby little earth-family divided over its
clod, the strong robbing the weak in the midst of plenty for
all--enslaving them to starve and toil and fight, spending more for war
than would keep the entire family in luxury; that when God looks closer,
in his amazement, and finds that, next to greed, the matter of
worshipping Him has made most of the war and other deviltry--the hatred
and persecution and killing among all the little brothers--he will laugh
aloud before he reflects, and this little ballful of funny, passionate
insects will be blown to bits. He says if the world comes to an end in
his lifetime, he will know God has happened to look this way, and
perhaps overheard a bishop say something vastly important about
Apostolic succession or the validity of the Anglican Orders or
Transubstantiation or 'communion in two kinds' or something. He insists
that a sense of humour is our only salvation--that only those will be
saved who happen to be laughing for the same reason that God laughs when
He looks at us--that the little Mohammedans and Christians and things
will be burned for their blasphemy of believing God not wise and good
enough to save them all, Mohammedan and Christian alike, though not
thinking excessively well of either; that only those laughing at the
whole gory nonsense will go into everlasting life by reason of their
superior faith in God."