Lord of the World

Lord of the World

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Title: Lord of the World
Author: Robert Hugh Benson
Release Date: November 11, 2004 [EBook #14021]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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Produced by Geoff Horton

LORD OF THE WORLD
BY ROBERT HUGH BENSON
Dedication
CLAVI DOMUS DAVID
PREFACE
I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open to innumerable
criticisms on that account, as well as on many others. But I did not know how else to
express the principles I desired (and which I passionately believe to be true) except by
producing their lines to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly
loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for the opinions of
other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt is quite another matter.
Robert Hugh Benson.

CAMBRIDGE 1907.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
BOOK I THE ADVENT
BOOK II THE ENCOUNTER
BOOK III THE VICTORY
Persons who do not like tiresome prologues, need not read this one. It is essential only to
the situation, not to the story.

PROLOGUE
"You must give me a moment," said the old man, leaning back.
Percy resettled himself in his chair and waited, chin on hand.
It was a very silent room in which the three men sat, furnished with the extreme common
sense of the period. It had neither window nor door; for it was now sixty years since the
world, recognising that space is not confined to the surface of the globe, had begun to
burrow in earnest. Old Mr. Templeton's house stood some forty feet below the level of
the Thames embankment, in what was considered a somewhat commodious position, for
he had only a hundred yards to walk before he reached the station of the Second Central
Motor-circle, and a quarter of a mile to the volor-station at Blackfriars. He was over
ninety years old, however, and seldom left his house now. The room itself was lined
throughout with the delicate green jade-enamel prescribed by the Board of Health, and
was suffused with the artificial sunlight discovered by the great Reuter forty years before;
it had the colour-tone of a spring wood, and was warmed and ventilated through the
classical frieze grating to the exact temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade. Mr. Templeton
was a plain man, content to live as his father had lived before him. The furniture, too, was
a little old-fashioned in make and design, constructed however according to the
prevailing system of soft asbestos enamel welded over iron, indestructible, pleasant to the
touch, and resembling mahogany. A couple of book-cases well filled ran on either side of
the bronze pedestal electric fire before which sat the three men; and in the further corners
stood the hydraulic lifts that gave entrance, the one to the bedroom, the other to the
corridor fifty feet up which opened on to the Embankment.
Father Percy Franklin, the elder of the two priests, was rather a remarkable-looking man,
not more than thirty-five years old, but with hair that was white throughout; his grey eyes,
under black eyebrows, were peculiarly bright and almost passionate; but his prominent
nose and chin and the extreme decisiveness of his mouth reassured the observer as to his
will. Strangers usually looked twice at him.

Father Francis, however, sitting in his upright chair on the other side of the hearth,
brought down the average; for, though his brown eyes were pleasant and pathetic, there
was no strength in his face; there was even a tendency to feminine melancholy in the
corners of his mouth and the marked droop of his eyelids.
Mr. Templeton was just a very old man, with a strong face in folds, clean-shaven like the
rest of the world, and was now lying back on his water-pillows with the quilt over his
feet.
* * * * *
At last he spoke, glancing first at Percy, on his left.
"Well," he said, "it is a great business to remember exactly; but this is how I put it to
myself."
"In England our party was first seriously alarmed at the Labour Parliament of 1917. That
showed us how deeply Herveism had impregnated the whole social atmosphere. There
had been Socialists before, but none like Gustave Herve in his old age--at least no one of
the same power. He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism