A couple of hours must have passed, while Thyrsis said nothing, but listened to Delia and watched her, probing deeply into the agonies and futilities of life. He had given up all hope of persuading her to stay with them; he thought only of the tragedy, that this noble spirit should be tangled up and blundering about in the mazes of a grotesque dogma. And the time came when he could endure it no more; something rose up within him, something tremendous and terrible, and he laid hold of Delia Gordon’s soul to wrestle with it, as never before had he wrestled with any human soul except Corydon’s. The truth of the matter was that Thyrsis loved the religious people; it was among them that he had been brought up, and their ways were his ways. This was a fact that came to him rarely now, for he was hard-driven and bitter; but it was true that when he sneered at the church and taunted it, he was like a parent who whips a child he loves. Perhaps Paret had spoken truly in one of his cruel jests--that when a man has been brought up religious, he can never really get over it, he can never really be free. So now Thyrsis spoke to Delia as one who was himself of the faith of Jesus; he cried out to her that what she wanted was what he wanted, that all her attitudes and ways of working were his. And here were monstrous evils alive upon the earth--here were all the forces of hell unleashed, and ranging like savage beasts destroying the lives of men and women! And those who truly cared, those who had the conscience and the faith of the world in their keeping--they were wasting their time in disputations about barren formulas, questions which had no relationship to human life! Questions of the meaning of old Hebrew texts that had often no meaning at all, and of folk-tales and fairy-stories out of the nursery of the race--the problem of whether Jonah had swallowed the whale, or the whale had swallowed Jonah--the problem of whether it was on Friday or Saturday that the Lord had finished the earth. Because of such things as this, they drove all thinking men from their ranks, they degraded and made ridiculous the very name of faith! As he went on, the agony of this swept over Thyrsis--until it seemed to him as if he had the whole Christian Church before him, and was pleading with it in the voice of Jesus. Here was a new crucifixion--a crucifixion of civilization! Thyrsis cried out in the words, “Oh ye of little faith!” Truly, was it not the supreme act of infidelity, to make the spirit of religion, which was one with the impulse of all life--the force that made the flower bloom and oak-tree tower and the infant cry for its food--to make it dependent upon Hebrew texts and Assyrian folk-tales! Delia preached to him about “faith”; but what was her faith in comparison with his, which was a faith in all life--which trusted the soul of man, and reason as part of the soul of man, a thing which God had put in man to be used, and not to be feared and outraged.