Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia’s silver chariot. In Surgery the Short Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments, provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.
Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate—consider.... This quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham’s breast and in yours and mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator—this Ego for whose eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man, weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.
The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders, when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund’s sixteenth of an ounce?
It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the human race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through. You looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his nature had been rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with flowers.