the sun, that shines on the evil and the good and on mud and monsters
everywhere. The temple is of the noon; it is made of white marble clouds
and sapphire sky. But the sun is not always of the noon. The sun dies
daily, every night he is crucified in blood and fire." Now the priest
had taught and fought through all the war, and his hair had grown white,
but his eyes had grown young. And he said, "I was wrong and they are
right. The sun, the symbol of our father, gives life to all those
earthly things that are full of ugliness and energy. All the
exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. Let us
point to heaven with tusks and horns and fins and trunks and tails so
long as they all point to heaven. The ugly animals praise God as much
as the beautiful. The frog's eyes stand out of his head because he is
staring at heaven. The giraffe's neck is long because he is stretching
towards heaven. The donkey has ears to hear--let him hear."

And under the new inspiration they planned a gorgeous cathedral in the
Gothic manner, with all the animals of the earth crawling over it, and
all the possible ugly things making up one common beauty, because they
all appealed to the god. The columns of the temple were carved like the
necks of giraffes; the dome was like an ugly tortoise; and the highest
pinnacle was a monkey standing on his head with his tail pointing at the
sun. And yet the whole was beautiful, because it was lifted up in one
living and religious gesture as a man lifts his hands in prayer.

III

But this great plan was never properly completed. The people had brought
up on great wagons the heavy tortoise roof and the huge necks of stone,
and all the thousand and one oddities that made up that unity, the owls
and the efts and the crocodiles and the kangaroos, which hideous
by themselves might have been magnificent if reared in one definite
proportion and dedicated to the sun. For this was Gothic, this was
romantic, this was Christian art; this was the whole advance of
Shakespeare upon Sophocles. And that symbol which was to crown it all,
the ape upside down, was really Christian; for man is the ape upside
down.

But the rich, who had grown riotous in the long peace, obstructed the
thing, and in some squabble a stone struck the priest on the head and
he lost his memory. He saw piled in front of him frogs and elephants,
monkeys and giraffes, toadstools and sharks, all the ugly things of the
universe