There was nothing you could say to Chrysostom Trotter, provided
you said it reverently, that would startle him. He knew all that long
ago and far more. For, though obliged to trade in this backwater of
belief, he was in many respects a very modern mind. You were hardly
likely to know your Herbert Spencer as intimately as he, and all the
most exquisite literature of doubt was upon his shelves. Though you
might declare him superficially disingenuous, you could not, unless you
were some commonplace atheist or materialist, gainsay the honest logic
of his position.
"You believe that the world, that life, is a spiritual mystery?" he
would say.
"Yes."
"You do not for a moment think that any materialistic science has
remotely approached an adequate explanation of its meaning?"
"Certainly not."
"You believe too that, however it comes about, and whatever it means,
there is an eternal struggle in man between what, for sake of argument,
we will call the higher and lower natures?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, this spiritual mystery, this struggle, are hinted at in
various media of human expression, in an ever-changing variety of human
symbols.
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