To do him justice it was not himself that he greatly cared about. He
knew he had been humbugged, and he knew also that the greater part of the
ills which had afflicted him were due, indirectly, in chief measure to
the influence of Christian teaching; still, if the mischief had ended
with himself, he should have thought little about it, but there was his
sister, and his brother Joey, and the hundreds and thousands of young
people throughout England whose lives were being blighted through the
lies told them by people whose business it was to know better, but who
scamped their work and shirked difficulties instead of facing them. It
was this which made him think it worth while to be angry, and to consider
whether he could not at least do something towards saving others from
such years of waste and misery as he had had to pass himself. If there
was no truth in the miraculous accounts of Christ's Death and
Resurrection, the whole of the religion founded upon the historic truth
of those events tumbled to the ground. "My," he exclaimed, with all the
arrogance of youth, "they put a gipsy or fortune-teller into prison for
getting money out of silly people who think they have supernatural power;
why should they not put a clergyman in prison for pretending that he can
absolve sins, or turn bread and wine into the flesh and blood of One who
died two thousand years ago? What," he asked himself, "could be more
pure 'hanky-panky' than that a bishop should lay his hands upon a young
man and pretend to convey to him the spiritual power to work this
miracle? It was all very well to talk about toleration; toleration, like
everything else, had its limits; besides, if it was to include the bishop
let it include the fortune-teller too.
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