Calamy shook his head. “Salvation’s not in the next world; it’s in this. One doesn’t behave well here for the sake of a harp and wings after one is dead—or even for the sake of contemplating throughout eternity the good, the true and the beautiful. If one desires salvation, it’s salvation here and now. The kingdom of God is within you—if you’ll excuse the quotation,” he added, turning with a smile to Mr. Cardan. “The conquest of that kingdom, now, in this life—that’s your salvationist’s ambition. There may be a life to come, or there may not; it’s really quite irrelevant to the main issue. To be upset because the soul may decay with the body is really mediaeval. Your mediaeval theologian made up for his really frightful cynicism about this world by a childish optimism about the next. Future justice was to compensate for the disgusting horrors of the present. Take away the life to come and the horrors remain, untempered and unpalliated.” “Quite so,” said Chelifer. “Seen from the mediaeval point of view,” Calamy went on, “the prospect is most disquieting. The Indians—and for that matter the founder of Christianity—supply the corrective with the doctrine of salvation in this life, irrespective of the life to come. Each man can achieve salvation in his own way.” “I’m glad you admit that,” said Mr. Cardan. “I was afraid you’d begin telling us that we all had to live on lettuces and look at our navels.” “I have it from no less an authority than yourself,” Calamy answered, laughing, “that there are—how many?—eighty-four thousand—isn’t it?—different ways of achieving salvation.” “Fully,” said Mr. Cardan, “and a great many more for going to the devil. But all this, my young friend,” he pursued, shaking his head, “doesn’t in any way mitigate the disagreeableness of slowly becoming _gaga_, dying and being eaten by worms. One may have achieved salvation in this life, certainly; but that makes it none the less insufferable that, at the end of the account, one’s soul should inevitably succumb to one’s body. I, for example, am saved—I put the case quite hypothetically, mind you—I have been living in a state of moral integrity and this-worldly salvation for the last half century, ever since I reached the age of puberty. Let this be granted. Have I, for this reason, any the less cause to be distressed by the prospect, in a few years’ time, of becoming a senile imbecile, blind, deaf, toothless, witless, without interest in anything, partially paralysed, revolting to my fellows—and all the rest of the Burtonian catalogue? When my soul is at the mercy of my slowly rotting body, what will be the use of salvation then?” “It will have profited during the fifty years of healthy life,” said Calamy. “But I’m talking about the unhealthy years,” Mr. Cardan insisted, “when the soul’s at the mercy of the body.”