Page:The Ball and the Cross.djvu/291

“Do you really believe it?” asked the other.

“Scores of them, I should say,” answered MacIan. “Fellows who have read medical books or fellows whose fathers and uncles had something hereditary in their heads—the whole air they breathe is mad.”

“All the same,” said Turnbull, shrewdly, “I bet you haven’t found a madman of that sort.”

“I bet I have!” cried Evan, with unusual animation. “I’ve been walking about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He’s simply been broken down and driven raving by your damned science. Talk about believing one is God—why, it’s quite an old, comfortable, fireside fancy compared with the sort of things this fellow believes. He believes that there is a God, but that he is better than God. He says God will be afraid to face him. He says one is always progressing beyond the best. He put his arm in mine and whispered in my ear, as if it were the apocalypse: ‘Never trust a God that you can’t improve on.’”

“What can he have meant?” said the atheist, with all his logic awake. “Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on.”