"You are exultant, Mr. Schuabe," he said coldly, "but you will hardly be so long."
"You do not appreciate the situation, sir," Schuabe answered. "I can see further than you. A great intellectual peace will descend over the civilised world. Should one not exult at that, even though men must give up their dearest fetishes, their secret shrines; even though sentiment must be sacrificed to Truth? The religion of Nature, which is based upon the determination not to believe anything which is unsupported by indubitable evidence, will become the faith of the future, the fulfilment of progress. It is as Huxley said, '_Religion ought to mean simply reverence and love for the Ethical Ideal, and the desire to realise that Ideal in life._' Miracles do not happen. There has been no supernatural revelation, and nothing can be known of what Herbert Spencer calls the Infinite and Eternal Energy save by the study of the phenomena about us. And I repeat that the discovery we hear of to-day makes a thorough intellectual sanity possible for each living man. Doubt will disappear."
"Yes, Mr. Schuabe," said Mrs. Armstrong, "you are right, incalculably right. It is to human intellect and that alone--the great Intellect of The Nazarene among others--that we must look from henceforth. Already by his unaided efforts man's achievements are everywhere breaking down superstition. The arts, the laws of gravitation, force, light, heat, sound, chemistry, electricity, and all that these imply--botany, medicine, bacteria, the circulation of the blood, the functions of the brain and nervous system (last-named abolishing all witchcraft and diabolic possession, such as we read of in the 'inspired' writings)--all these are but incidents in a progress never aided by the supernatural, but always impeded by the professors of it. Christians tortured the man who discovered the rotation of the earth, and in every church to-day absolutely false accounts of the origin of the world are publicly read. And as long as the world was content to believe that Jesus rose from the dead so long error has hindered development."
"Yes," replied Schuabe, "all this will, I believe, inevitably follow the discovery of the professors in Palestine. And what does Christianity, as it is at present accepted, bring to the Christians? Localise it, and look at the English Church--Canon Walke's Church. At one time every one is a rigid Puritan and decries the bare accessories of worship, at another a Ritualist who twists and turns everything into fantastic shapes, as if he were furnishing an æsthetic bazaar. At another time these people are swayed with the doctrines of 'Christian Science,' and believe that pain is a pure trick of the diseased fancy, and matter the morbid creation of an unhealthy mind. Then we hear priests who tell us that the Old Testament (which in the same breath they announce to be witnessed to by Christ and His Apostles and the unbroken continuity of the Catholic Church) is an enlarged and plagiarised version of the days of a fantastic god discovered on a burnt brick at Babylon. And others sit anxiously waiting to know the precise value which this or that Gospel may possess, as its worth fluctuates like shares in the money market, with the last quotation from Germany! All this will cease."