--Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for
you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set
her mind at rest.

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if
giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:

--Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a
mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries
you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But
whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are
our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat
Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads
thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the
words, said with assumed carelessness:

--Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss
him as he feared the contact of her sex.

--Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.

--Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said.

--And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

--The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

--I don't care a flaming damn what anyone calls him, Cranly said rudely
and flatly. I call him a pig.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

--Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in
public but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has
apologized for him.

--Did the idea ever occur to you, Cranly asked, that Jesus was not
what he pretended to be?

--The first person to whom that idea occurred, Stephen answered, was
Jesus himself.

--I mean, Cranly said, hardening in his speech, did the idea ever
occur to you that he was himself a conscious hypocrite, what he called
the jews of his time, a whited sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly,
that he was a blackguard?

--That idea never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious
to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of
yourself?

He turned towards his friend's face and saw there a raw smile which
some force of will strove to make finely significant.

Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone:

--Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?

--Somewhat, Stephen said.

--And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you
feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of
God?

--I am not at