pen by the end of the world; and in the last
days we shall see it taking on those volcanic sunset colours, and
leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.

But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic
actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the
phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this
imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy
is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread and cheese," which I have
cited elsewhere in this connection; and in that noble nightmare of a
Scandinavian legend, in which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out
of a horn. In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to
be read before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will
concede that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite is
to be regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finally
demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world. It is a
hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say of a theory when
there is no evidence for it so far.

But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly gone
mad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks of trees;
or seriously altering (by large semicircular mouthfuls) the exquisite
outline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing a fresh solidity
by the image of eating is really a very old one. So far from being a
paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest commonplaces of religion.
If any one wandering about wants to have a good trick or test for
separating the wrong idealism from the right, I will give him one on the
spot. It is a mark of false religion that it is always trying to
express concrete facts as abstract; it calls sex affinity; it calls wine
alcohol; it calls brute starvation the economic problem. The test of
true religion is that its energy drives exactly the other way; it is
always trying to make men feel truths as facts; always trying to make
abstract things as plain and solid as concrete things; always trying to
make men, not merely admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear,
and devour the truth. All great spiritual scriptures are full of the
invitation not to test, but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their
phrases are full of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna
and dreadful wine. Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has
despised this instinct