The generative power of man and the all-pervading Ether, conscious in him, are the Material sources of the idea of God. From the first source there comes also the idea of Sin cognate and isomeric with the idea of God. (The Devil, the personification of God as Sin, has been so long a joke that he is out of court.) These twin ideas God and Sin died together on Calvary two thousand years ago. The history of Christendom is the history of the obsequies of these ideas, of the devolution of these ideas. ("The Testament of a Prime Minister," pp. 76-81.) Out of Matter the Myth of God and Sin and Heaven and Hell arose. Return that myth in which the imagination of Christendom still dwells in all serious moods and times of passion, return it to its Material source, and let the world's imagination go with it and be born again, to live no longer in a myth but in the Universe itself. I say, with the Prime Minister, let
"the passionate heart of man, The proud imagination and the dream That hovers homeless as the myths decay, Exempt from fabulous wonder, rooted deep In Substance one and multiform, and breathed In all the mystery of the things that are, Create indomitable will to truth, An open mind at home in space and time, A stainless memory splendidly endowed With actual knowledge, a Material soul At one with the Material Universe."
With the Bishop of St. James's I watch the future, an actual world wherein an actual man shall be and do greatly
"In majesty Material, the Nessus-shirt Of spirit, warp and woof of legend, dyed In many-coloured Sin, the mordant shame That cankered life, and clung, a grafted hide About his innocent flesh, fallen off, or flayed With hideous woe, and in its proper filth Corrupted into naught. Forthwith the world Begins again, not even a pallid dream Of legendary pasts to cloud the dawn. I say it simply:--With the Universe Man clothes himself; arrayed in time and space, In darkness and in light, no lamp, no gleam He follows, for the sun illumines him And every sun his kinsmen in the skies, The systems, constellations, galaxies. At home in the empyrean, issuing thence, His free imagination momently Remembers flame pellucid, which it was And will be in the nebula again When all the orbs that stock the loins of night Return into the sun, and fill with seed Of chastest fire the impassioned womb of space."