The Ball and The Cross | Page 2

modern world was intellectual enough
even to understand their argument. The old monk, one of whose names was Michael, and
the other a name quite impossible to remember or repeat in our Western civilization, had,
however, as I have said, made himself quite happy while he was in a mountain hermitage
in the society of wild animals. And now that his luck had lifted him above all the

mountains in the society of a wild physicist, he made himself happy still.
"I have no intention, my good Michael," said Professor Lucifer, "of endeavouring to
convert you by argument. The imbecility of your traditions can be quite finally exhibited
to anybody with mere ordinary knowledge of the world, the same kind of knowledge
which teaches us not to sit in draughts or not to encourage friendliness in impecunious
people. It is folly to talk of this or that demonstrating the rationalist philosophy.
Everything demonstrates it. Rubbing shoulders with men of all kinds----"
"You will forgive me," said the monk, meekly from under loads of white beard, "but I
fear I do not understand; was it in order that I might rub my shoulder against men of all
kinds that you put me inside this thing?"
"An entertaining retort, in the narrow and deductive manner of the Middle Ages," replied
the Professor, calmly, "but even upon your own basis I will illustrate my point. We are up
in the sky. In your religion and all the religions, as far as I know (and I know everything),
the sky is made the symbol of everything that is sacred and merciful. Well, now you are
in the sky, you know better. Phrase it how you like, twist it how you like, you know that
you know better. You know what are a man's real feelings about the heavens, when he
finds himself alone in the heavens, surrounded by the heavens. You know the truth, and
the truth is this. The heavens are evil, the sky is evil, the stars are evil. This mere space,
this mere quantity, terrifies a man more than tigers or the terrible plague. You know that
since our science has spoken, the bottom has fallen out of the Universe. Now, heaven is
the hopeless thing, more hopeless than any hell. Now, if there be any comfort for all your
miserable progeny of morbid apes, it must be in the earth, underneath you, under the
roots of the grass, in the place where hell was of old. The fiery crypts, the lurid cellars of
the underworld, to which you once condemned the wicked, are hideous enough, but at
least they are more homely than the heaven in which we ride. And the time will come
when you will all hide in them, to escape the horror of the stars."
"I hope you will excuse my interrupting you," said Michael, with a slight cough, "but I
have always noticed----"
"Go on, pray go on," said Professor Lucifer, radiantly, "I really like to draw out your
simple ideas."
"Well, the fact is," said the other, "that much as I admire your rhetoric and the rhetoric of
your school, from a purely verbal point of view, such little study of you and your school
in human history as I have been enabled to make has led me to--er--rather singular
conclusion, which I find great difficulty in expressing, especially in a foreign language."
"Come, come," said the Professor, encouragingly, "I'll help you out. How did my view
strike you?"
"Well, the truth is, I know I don't express it properly, but somehow it seemed to me that
you always convey ideas of that kind with most eloquence, when--er--when----"
"Oh! get on," cried Lucifer, boisterously.
"Well, in point of fact when your flying ship is just going to run into something. I thought
you wouldn't mind my mentioning it, but it's running into something now."
Lucifer exploded with an oath and leapt erect, leaning hard upon the handle that acted as
a helm to the vessel. For the last ten minutes they had been shooting downwards into
great cracks and caverns of cloud. Now, through a sort of purple haze, could be seen
comparatively near to them what seemed to be the upper part of a huge, dark orb or
sphere, islanded in a sea of cloud. The Professor's eyes were blazing like a maniac's.

"It is a new world," he cried, with a dreadful mirth. "It is a new planet and it shall bear
my name. This star and not that other vulgar one shall be 'Lucifer, sun of the morning.'
Here we will have no chartered lunacies, here we will have no gods. Here man shall be as
innocent as the daisies, as innocent and as cruel--here the intellect----"
"There seems," said Michael, timidly, "to be