Collected Works (Vol. II)

272 TIME which comes to the same thing, serve us as standards of time. Myst. A strange measure! What is the comparison in one of your poets between ‘Fifty years of Europe” and ‘‘a cycle of Cathay ” ? | Scept. You know our poets well. * Myst. Among my loose tags of thought are several thousand useless quotations. I would give much to have my memory swept and garnished. Scept. Seven other devils wait at the door. But you were saying? Myst. That an astronomer might perhaps justly compute the time during which his eye was actually at the telescope by the motion of the planets, or by the clockwork of his re- flector, but that you should do so is absurd. Scept. Yet all men do so and have ever done so. see him writhing in eternal torture — that physiological impossibility—for his word ‘‘a casual carpenter,” albeit he wrote it in rever- ence. That is the kind of Christian 1 would hang. The Christian who can write as Our Champion of Christendom does about his faith is innocuous and pleasant, though in my heart I am compelled to class him with the bloodless desperadoes of the ‘‘Order of the White Rose” and the ‘‘moutons enragés”’ that preach revolution in Hyde Park. When he says that he will trace ‘‘ the out- lines of two vast and mystical philosophies, which if they were subtly and slowly worked out, &c., &c.,” he is simply thrown away on Nonconformity; and I trust I do not go too far, as the humblest member of the Rationalist Press Association, when I suggest that that diabolical body would be delighted to bring out a sixpenny edition of his book. Iam not fighting pious opinions. But there are perfectly definite acts which encroach upon the freedom of the individual: indefensible in themselves, they seek apology in the Bible, which is now to be smuggled through as a ‘‘ poem.” If I may borrow my adversary's favourite missile, a poem in this sense is ‘‘ unhistorical nonsense."’ We should, perhaps, fail to appreciate the beauty of the Tantras if the Government (on their authority) enforced the practices of hook- swinging and Sati, and the fact that the cited passages were of doubtful authority, and am- -biguous at that, would be small comfort to our grilled widows and lacerated backs. Yet this is the political condition of England Myst. And all are absurd in doing so, if they really do so, which I doubt. Even the lowest dimly, or perhaps automatically, perceive the folly thereof z Scept, As? Myst. A man will say ‘‘ Since the Derby was run” more intelligibly than ‘since May such-and-such a day”; for his memory is of the race, not of a particular item in the ever changing space-relation of the heavens, a relation which he can never know, and of which he can never perceive the significance: nay, which he can never recognise, even by landmarks of catastrophic importance. Scept. One might be humorous on this subject by the hour. Picture to yourself a lawyer cross-examining a farm hand as to the time of an occurrence: ‘‘Now, Mr. Noakes, I must warn you to be very careful. Had Herschell occulted a Centauri before you left Farmer Stubbs’ field?” while the instructed swain should not blush to reply at this ‘hour. You invoke a ‘‘ casual camel- driver ’’ to serve your political ends and prevent me having eighteen wives as against four: I prove him an impostor, and you call my atten- tion to the artistic beauty of Ya Sin. I point out that Ya Sin says nothing about four wives, and you say that all moral codes limit the number. [ ask you why all this fuss about Mohammed, in that case, and you write all my sentences—and your own—Qabalistically backwards, and it comes out: ‘' Praise be to -Allah for the Apostle of Allah, and for the Faith of Islam. And the favour of Allah upon him, and the peace !”’ War, I think, if those be the terms. POSTSCRIPT War under certain conditions becomes a question of pace, and I really cannot give my cavalry so much work as Our Brer Rabbit would require. On the appearance of the first part of his article ‘‘Mr. Crowley and the Creeds"’ I signified my intention to reply. It aborted his attack on me, and he has not since been heard of, In the midst of the words he was trying to say, In the midst of hts laughter and glee, He has softly and suddenly vanished away— I suppose I always was a bit of a Boojum !