VI


One day I said to Amroth, "What a comfort it is to find that there is no
religion here!"

"I know what you mean," he said. "I think it is one of the things that
one wonders at most, to remember into how very small and narrow a thing
religion was made, and how much that was religious was never supposed to
be so."

"Yes," I said, "as I think of it now, it seems to have been a game
played by a few players, a game with a great many rules."

"Yes," he said, "it was a game often enough; but of course the mischief
of it was, that when it was most a game it most pretended to be
something else--to contain the secret of life and all knowledge."

"I used to think," I said, "that religion was like a noble and generous
boy with the lyrical heart of a poet, made by some sad chance into a
king, surrounded by obsequious respect and pomp and etiquette, bound by
a hundred ceremonious rules, forbidden to do this and that, taught to
think that his one duty was to be magnificently attired, to acquire
graceful arts of posture and courtesy, subtly and gently prevented from
obeying natural and simple impulses, made powerless--a crowned slave; so
that, instead of being the freest and sincerest thing in the world, it
became the prisoner of respectability and convention, just a part of the
social machine."