He took up the poker and stirred the fire.
‘That will do, Dennis,’ said Marshall, who was evidently fidgety. ‘The room is rather warm. There’s nothing in Vincent which irritates me more than those bits of poetry with which he winds up.
and all that stuff. If God made the man, God made the slave. I know what Vincent’s little game is, and it is the same game with all his set. They want to keep Chartism religious, but we shall see. Let us once get the six points, and the Established Church will go, and we shall have secular education, and in a generation there will not be one superstition left.’
‘Theological superstition, you mean?’ said Clara.
‘Yes, of course, what others are there worth notice?’
‘A few. The superstition of the ordinary newspaper reader is just as profound, and the tyranny of the majority may be just as injurious as the superstition of a Spanish peasant, or the tyranny of the Inquisition.’
‘Newspapers will not burn people as the priests did and would do again if they had the power, and they do not insult us with fables and a hell and a heaven.’
‘I maintain,’ said Clara with emphasis, ‘that if a man declines to examine, and takes for granted what a party leader or a newspaper tells him, he has no case against the man who declines to examine, or takes for granted what the priest tells him. Besides, although, as you know, I am not a convert myself, I do lose a little patience when I hear it preached as a gospel to every poor conceited creature who goes to your Sunday evening atheist lecture, that he is to believe nothing on one particular subject which his own precious intellect cannot verify, and the next morning he finds it to be his duty to swallow wholesale anything you please to put into his mouth. As to the tyranny, the day may come, and I believe is approaching, when the majority will be found to be more dangerous than any ecclesiastical establishment which ever existed.’
Baruch’s lips moved, but he was silent. He was not strong in argument. He was thinking about Marshall’s triumphant inquiry whether God is not responsible for slavery. He would have liked to say something on that subject, but he had nothing ready.
‘Practical people,’ said Dennis, who had not quite recovered from the rebuke as to the warmth of the room, ‘are often most unpractical and injudicious. Nothing can be more unwise than to mix up politics and religion. If you _do_,’ Dennis waved his hand, ‘you will have all the religious people against you. My friend Marshall, Miss Hopgood, is under the illusion that the Church in this country is tottering to its fall. Now, although I myself belong to no sect, I do not share his illusion; nay, more, I am not sure’—Mr Dennis spoke slowly, rubbed his chin and looked up at the ceiling—‘I am not sure that there is not something to be said in favour of State endowment—at least, in a country like Ireland.’