He happened to know, and would tell them: not essentially the saint, the philosopher, the plutocrat, but essentially the acrobat--the man with his fibres mobile, his breast like pent Pentecost. The saint, the philosopher, the artist, were happy also, but only because they were acrobats in their fashion. This was just the news of Christianity, that along the path of self-torture lay in ambush a marvel of awaking, a scarlet dawn: to evolve they must twist themselves. And let them know that the soul was a trick of the body. The result of a beauish body was a religious saltarello. Were they covetous to stride out into the infinite?--let them scout in the finite on every side. _Mens sancta in corpore sancto._ No more, then, of the old necks, teeth, effete souls.

With respect to teeth, there was a misconception abroad which he wished to correct: they all knew that in a few ages man was fated to become a toothless gumption: well, but there were two paths to that gate, not only through decay, but, secondly, through the decrease of the teeth in size, till at last they disappeared. Let them choose the latter by chary mating. Devotion to evolution was for the future their only possible piety; so their own bodies must be their care all day long, till their every movement of muscle or brain was a pattern of grace. Perfection! it had to be: why not now? greyhounds were perfect. The men of late generations had really been rather grotesque, crowds of them strutting their personalities about in some rag or gaud of spiritual skill, yet glaring with the lues of a low evolution. One of the most highly-famed poets of the nineteenth century had had--what did they think?--a paunch.

"Ho! Ho!" he howled, "think of the pure grotesqueness of it! a poet with a pouch! no wonder he was obscure! it is like a poet with spectacles on his nose! or a poet with bo-peep in his teeth, whom no pious miss would kiss!" No, that wouldn't do. The chimpanzee vaunted a paunch, and we were devoutly getting done with paunches now, thank G.o.d. From men of this age G.o.d did not so much need glorious books, of which He was choke-full, but was greedy for glorious children, darting eyes, laughing caverns. The men of the past had learned from St Paul that "bodily exercise profiteth little"; for us it was the main means of grace and the sole hope of glory, of grace for the Roman, of glory for the race.

By it they would attain to harmony with G.o.d. It had been said by men of old: "G.o.d is Love." "How could they possibly know it?" he shouted: "how profound an insight! for this that to us is old science and certainty to them was only surmise. But what, then, does G.o.d love? Not apes, not men, His taste being a bit touchy: G.o.d, we know, did once love, or press toward, apes when only dogs and half-apes were; and He did once love men when only ape-people were; but the moment men appeared He left off loving them, and was for loving their children: always it is evolution that He loves, change, the future, with urge and urge and urge." So in loving the future they would be all in harmony with Him, loving what He loved. That future was full of shapes and plays. Happily, they could shape themselves to pledge and usher it in: for that was the right of man--to change himself; that was the definition of man--"a self-changing midget"; and an age was in the eye of the Highest when, by the heightening of this right of self-change, earthly lives would writhe in a trice into any shape of wyvern, or moose, or shivering seraph, or moon-eyed octopus, or quadruped with its belly to the sky and its back to the earth. Meantime, by pitifuler pantings, they, if they were fat, could make themselves fit; if they were short, they should, by taking thought, add one quarter-cubit to their stature; if they were bow-legged like the orang, self-bearding would get themselves knock-kneed like the c.o.c.k; if they were starting and rapturous like the gorilla, they could get themselves impregnably calm like the overman; in an age or two they could change or redress their quite unnecessary length of arm, of spine, their over-plump shortness of leg, their base remoteness of s.e.x-organ from brain, their too shameful "_ears_," sham thumbs. They must tackle themselves humbly and in detail. Christianity had been far too heady and star-drunken, had made a leap three feet high to pluck Venus from the sky. We of this age must be more grave and grown-up, more self-conscious and disabused, must use a ladder, come back to the cla.s.sic. The romantic would return some day in some new dress, for cla.s.sic and romantic were alternate moods of the mind, neither could ever die. But for us of this age it was the cla.s.sic, the austere, bare comeliness of reason. If our life and worship was barer and harder than that of the past, it was also far higher. But let them not view our worship as yet worthy to be so called. The idol of the worship of the time to come would be the nightly sky. Man, so far, though with a much larger subconsciousness, looked forth at the stars with a consciousness little larger than that of gorillas, even with some fatigue; was still a villager of the earth, not yet a civilian of the universe; a few of the most elfin ears, they were told did, it was true, by an effort, and dullishly, catch some actual tollings of the chiming and dulcimers; but he believed that brains larger than ours, when they came, would pa.s.s pretty nearly all of life in brooding upon the runes of that writing.

Let them wait, meekly grooming themselves to greet that "come to the marriage" which they would hear, and soon, lo, the scales would fall from man's eyes, his tongue should be loosed and enchanted, and the earth should arise at last as the mourning-dove to hie to her room in the chancel of the heavens.

When Rivers had finished speaking we sang another hymn; again the trumpets pealed, organs braved, while the road-march and high brotherhood of it brushed in shiverings over one's back, and troubled the vast building to its base:

"Time like an ever-rolling stream Bears all his sons away, They fly forgotten. :::"