“’Tis a point that seems to me self-evident, Lord Marketharborough. Since when have you been taught in your schools that the laws, which you, my lord, so vigorously interpret, come from Jehovah? The only laws that Jehovah ever gave to the world were the tribal laws that may have been good enough for a pack of grubby Jews in the dawn of understanding but have been broken ever since at Satan’s instigation by every self-respecting person: laws that encourage cruelty, exact poverty, condemn beauty, deride chivalry, proscribe joy, deplore elegance, and insist on a sordid and indiscriminate chastity. But was it Jehovah who gave you the divine consolation of Divorce? Or is it not He, the jealous God, who is ever so envious of Satan’s suggestions for greater happiness between men and women that He has imbued His priests on earth with a ferocious enmity to everything that can untie a man and a woman from the intolerable ordeal of an unhappy union. Jehovah has given you the sword, the rack, pestilence, Christianity, The King’s Proctor and Prohibition. Satan gave you the glorious beauty of Greece, the Pax Romana and the genius of invention. Jehovah gave you that ill-favoured lout, Martin Luther. Satan gave you Voltaire, who was a fallen archangel incarnate. Jehovah gave you the Cross. Satan gave you Chivalry. O Chivalry, poor broken-winged angel of light! She was the dark one’s favourite child, but your dour civilisation of the past ten centuries has been maiming her until she now lies broken and dying, her tears washing over the ruins of the past, her soul agonised by visions of the holocausts of the future, her eyes set with despairing prayer only on the few scientists, inventors and artists who are the hope of this rapacious and saintly world.” The agreeable and scholarly voice of Mr. Warp broke the silence: “Your utterances, sir, appear to me to show a decidedly anti-Semitic bias. Are you sure that is quite wise?” “Socially, yes; politically, no. And I believe, Mr. Warp, that all good Englishmen have been accommodating themselves to that dilemma for the last fifty years. By inclination, however, I am naturally an anti-Semite, since Hebrew is the language current in Paradise.” “For pity’s sake,” said M. des Beaux-Aces, “don’t say that English is the language current in Hell. They have already all the richest colonies.” “In the Scriptures,” said Dame Warp bitterly, “it is written, if I remember aright, that persons with such unconventional views as yours are consigned forever with appropriate torments to a place which it ill befits a decent woman--I said a _decent_ woman--to call Hell. I can see, however, no traces of the chastening effect of so proper a punishment in your form of address to people to whom you have been scarcely introduced. Indeed, you seem to be an unpleasantly self-assured young man.”