Yet it had not occurred seriously to anybody, so far as I knew, that the mordant scenery of _Ape and Essence_ was a logical extension of current events. Wild fantasy, the critics thought--having insufficient imagination to evaluate past or present and no education in the sciences whatever, as a rule. Well, I thought, when and if we reach the state of cannibalism, I shall try to eat a critic. There should be good crackling around fat heads. And next I thought that even Huxley made too little of the fact that, after our earth was literally Hell for a hundred years, man produced the Renaissance. I also thought how no one apparently had realized that the Californian cult of Belial was an inversion of the Roman Catholic parades, liturgies, chants and other idolatrous measures. And I thought how the Huxleyan method disclosed, with considerable vim and penetration, that Christian worship--Catholic or Protestant--is all but completely a paean for Satan today. The Godly serve the Devil through hatred, hypocrisy, materialism, conceit and big death wishes. They need only a change of names and symbols to align what they actually do with their pretension. Belial already reigns over the Church--not God. Someday, after the atomic wars--I thought--a practitioner of the corrupted religion of his time, a science-hater (for what he deemed science had done to man), a legless character with three arms and two navels (owing to the general damage done the genes of all living things), a cannibal (but one who could still read a little), might discover this volume in the silence of a wrecked library and hail Huxley as a great prophet--a man with valuable new ideas for worship and fresh notions about sex relations in public places. Thus Huxley might contribute (contrary to his intent but in the same fashion as many other prophets) to the majestic rites of human degradation. No critic, however, could possibly contemplate such a matter as anything but a joke. I wondered how the great-grandchildren of critics would view it. Thus wondering, I went to bed. It was late, of course. I put out my light and listened to the seismic nocturne of the city. From the next room came a bold, cajoling giggle. Then quiet. The building quivered. The planet turned. Exhaustion lowered me into sleep on a jerky rope that did not loosen me for a long time. 12