If Winter ComesHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
If Winter Comes
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Fiction
"He got up and hobbled about, excited, flushed, and talked like a man
who uses his headpiece for thinking. 'Where's that making to, Hapgood?'
he asked. 'I'll tell you,' he said. 'You'll get the people finding
there's a limit to the high prices they can demand for their labour:
apparently none to those the employers can go on piling up for their
profits. You'll get growing hatred by the middle classes with fixed
incomes of the labouring classes whose prices for their labour they'll
see--and feel--going up and up; and you'll get the same growing hatred
by the labouring classes for the capitalists. We've been nearly four
years on the crest, Hapgood,--on the crest of the war--and it's been all
classes as one class for the common good. I tell you, Hapgood, the
trough's ahead; we're steering for it; and it's rapid and perilous
sundering of the classes.
"'The new God,' old Sabre said. 'High prices, high prices: the highest
that can be squeezed. Temples to it everywhere. Ay, and sacrifices,
Hapgood. Immolations. Offering up of victims. No thought of those who
cannot pay the prices. Pay the prices, or get them, or go under. That's
the new God's creed.'
"I said to him, 'What's the remedy, Sabre?'
"He said to me, 'Hapgood, the remedy's the old remedy. The old God. But
it's more than that. It's Light: more light. The old revelation was good
for the old world, and suited to the old world, and told in terms of the
old world's understanding. Mystical for ages steeped in the mystical;
poetic for minds receptive of nothing beyond story and allegory and
parable. We want a new revelation in terms of the new world's
understanding. We want light, light! Do you suppose a man who lives on
meat is going to find sustenance in bread and milk? Do you suppose an
age that knows wireless and can fly is going to find spiritual
sustenance in the food of an age that thought thunder was God speaking?
Man's done with it. It means nothing to him; it gives nothing to him. He
turns all that's in him to get all he wants out of this world and let
the next go rip. Man cannot live by bread alone, the churches tell him;
but he says, "I _am_ living on bread alone, and doing well on it." But I
tell you, Hapgood, that plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every man's
soul is a hunger, a craving for other food than this earthy stuff. And
the churches know it; and instead of reaching down to him what he
wants--light, light--instead of that, they invite him to dancing and
picture shows, and you're a jolly good fellow, and religion's a jolly
fine thing and no spoilsport, and all that sort of latter-day tendency.
Damn it, he can get all that outside the churches and get it better.
Light, light! He wants light, Hapgood. And the padres come down and
drink beer with him, and watch boxing matches with him, and sing
music-hall songs with him, and dance Jazz with him, and call it making
religion a Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the hearts of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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