‘He is a blasphemer,’ said a friar. ‘Good people, did not you hear him say that what burned in hell was the Nothing?[89] Then nothing burns; _ergo_, there is no hell.’ ‘I don’t think he believes in God at all,’ cried one:—‘Did he not say something about caring no more for God than for a stone?’ ‘Ay, but,’ urged the friar, ‘no hell, and so no purgatory—think of that. Why, he has swept the universe as clean of the devil as a housewife’s platter at a christening.’ Some one in the crowd shouted out, ‘That fellow cares not what becomes of God, but he can’t give up his devil.’ Whereon the friar grew very red in the face, as we all laughed, but could not bethink him of any answer, and went capped with the name of Brother Brimstone ever after. ‘What was that he said,’ asked a slip-shod, sottish-looking tailor, ‘about doing what you like, and that is what God likes?’ ‘Friends,’ cries next a rainbow-coloured, dandified puppy, a secretary of the bishop’s, stroking the down of a would-be moustache, evidently as yet only in a state of Becoming (_Werden_)—‘I would fain have moderately kicked him,—— ‘My friends’ (smiling with a patronizing blandness at the tailor), ‘you are right; the public morals are in danger. Evil men and seducers wax worse and worse. But the Holy Church will protect her children. We have heard pestilent heresy this day. To hear that man talk, you would fancy he thought there was as much divinity in his little finger as in the whole body of the Virgin Mother of God.’