Konx Om Pax

THE STONE OF THE PHILOSOPHERS 89 Our best. You want a tender gray, Prepare your palette half the day, Take brush, and find to your surprise The snout of scarlet stab your eyes. Bad art, my boy! I never cared To try the piece again. —We’ve aired Our dinner. By the way, though, here You are. That ’s it! How smooth and clear The moonlight runs from point to hilt! Steel in the end beats silver-gilt! Well, there’s an end of my cigar: The girls will wonder where we are. Strange! how this question of motive deceives historians—and others! said the scholar. Froude was hardly a fool; but his Henry the Eighth is incredible. So is the conventional monster. I for one shall not be surprised at the Day of Judgment to hear that the Constantine of Protestantism was actuated by some quite simple motive like suppressed vegetarianism. Very likely it never happened at all, said Denzi! thoughtfully. Nothing ever did. Look at the Christ-myth. The Trial and Death and so on—mere stage-directions from a ritual of Mithraism. . . . But who was Mithras? asked the big man. Like any other question, it goes on for ever, til! you get to the big question. With your answer to it, said Basil. On the question of motive, though, said the Doctor, I like your theory of Messalina as an ascetic. Since the divine consciousness only appears as the negation of the human, and is only to be attained by wearing out all the sensation-points, till no response occurs to any stimulus—— Nonsense! interjected the big man, one can control them, not