'The head knaves of the horde, Those who inspire the rest and give the master word, The leaders of their thought, their lords political, Sages, kings, poets, priests, in their hearts one and all, For all their faith avowed and their lip service done In face of Thy high fires each day beneath the sun, Ay, and their prelates too, their men of godliest worth, Believe no word of Thee as master of their Earth, Controllers of their acts, no word of Thy high right To bend men to obedience, and at need to smite, No word of Thy true law, the enforcement of Thy peace, Thy all-deciding arm in the world's policies, They ignore Thee on the earth. They grant Thee, as their "God," The kingdom of the heavens, seeing it a realm untrod, Untreadable, by man, a space, a _res nullius_, Or No Man's Land which they, as loyal men and pious, Leave and assign to Thee to deal with as Thou wilt, To hold as Thy strong throne or loose as water spilt, For sun and wind to gather in the wastes of air. Whether of a Truth thou _art_, they know not, Lord, nor care; Only they name Thee "God," and pay Thee their prayers vain, As dormant over-lord and pensioned suzerain, The mediatised blind monarch of a world, outgrown Of its faith's swaddling clothes, which wills to walk alone.' These lines must be bitter in the teeth of the men of his generation, of the men who say openly that religion is for the seventh day, not for the week of work and war; who, churchgoers and chapelgoers alike, uphold the campaign of blood and plunder; who prate of Helots, and treat the Kaffir worse than any Helot that ever lived; who seek warrant in their Scriptures for endless slaughter, and for endless slavery, of all in any manner weaker than themselves; and who, with their jargon of civilisation, and their doggerel of cant, bear fire and pestilence over all the globe. Doubtless to man, convinced in deformity of his own beauty, in disease of his own health, in crime of his own virtue, in blood-lust of his own religious aims, the portrait of Man as given here in Satan's scathing words will be very offensive. All honour be to the man who has dared to draw it!