s going to find sustenance in bread and milk? Do you suppose an
age that knows wireless and can fly is going to find spiritual
sustenance in the food of an age that thought thunder was God speaking?
Man's done with it. It means nothing to him; it gives nothing to him. He
turns all that's in him to get all he wants out of this world and let
the next go rip. Man cannot live by bread alone, the churches tell him;
but he says, "I _am_ living on bread alone, and doing well on it." But I
tell you, Hapgood, that plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every man's
soul is a hunger, a craving for other food than this earthy stuff. And
the churches know it; and instead of reaching down to him what he
wants--light, light--instead of that, they invite him to dancing and
picture shows, and you're a jolly good fellow, and religion's a jolly
fine thing and no spoilsport, and all that sort of latter-day tendency.
Damn it, he can get all that outside the churches and get it better.
Light, light! He wants light, Hapgood. And the padres come down and
drink beer with him, and watch boxing matches with him, and sing
music-hall songs with him, and dance Jazz with him, and call it making
religion a Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the hearts of
the people to God, they say, by showing them that religion is not
incompatible with having a jolly fine time. _And there's no God there
that a man can understand for him to be lifted up to._ Hapgood, a man
wouldn't care _what_ he had to give up if he knew he was making for
something inestimably precious. But he doesn't know. Light,
light--that's what he wants; and the longer it's withheld the lower
he'll sink. Light! Light!'"

IV

"Well, I make no extra charge for that (said Hapgood, and helped himself
to a drink). That's not me. That's Sabre. And if you'd seen him as I saw
him, and if you'd heard him as I heard him, you'd have been as impressed
as I was impressed instead of lolling there like a surfeited python. I
tell you, old Sabre was all pink under his skin, and his eyes shining,
and his voice tingling. I tell you, if you were a real painter instead
of a base flatterer of bloated and wealthy sitters, and if you'd seen
him then, you'd have painted the masterpiece of your age and called it
The Visionary. I tell you, old Sabre was fine. He said he'd been
thinking all round that sort of stuff for years, and that now, for one
reason and another, it was beginning to crystallize in him and t