“Death by burning came to us from the great trans-Atlantic democracy, you know,” he said, leering at me. “Europe had forgotten it. But we set up the stakes again. I saw Archbishop Tremont, of York, and the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster burned side by side in the ruins of Westminster Hall. Then there was Bonham, of London, and Bethany, of Manchester, and Dean Cross, of Chichester; we put them in plaster of paris and unslaked lime first. The morons could have fled to Skandogermania, which was not free then. But they went, all three, into the Council Hall, and preached to the Council. That was in Boss Rose’s time. So they had to go. And they blessed us while their bones were crackling. You can’t make a progressive nation out of people like that.” I hurried toward the door. I pushed it open, and it swung back noiselessly behind me. Within the vastness of the Temple I heard a murmur rise, a wail of misery that made the ensuing silence more dreadful still. For here I encountered only thick gloom and emptiness, and soundless space, as though some veil of awful silence had been drawn before the tabernacle of an evil god. My knees shook as I advanced, clutching the rail beside my hand. I found myself upon a slender bridge that seemed to span the vault. It widened in the center to a small, square, stone-paved enclosure, like a flat altar-top, surrounded by a close-wrought grille that gleamed like gold. I halted here, and, looking down, saw, far beneath, a throng whose white faces stared upward like masks. Again that chant arose, and now I heard its burden: “We are immortal in the germ-plasm; make us immortal in the body before we die.” Then something beneath me began to assume shape as my eyes grew used to the obscurity. It was a great ant of gold, five hundred tons of it, perhaps, erected on a great pedestal of stone; where should have been the altar of the Savior of the world, there the abominable insect crawled, with its articulated, smooth body, and one antenna upraised. The symbol was graven clear. This was the aspiration of mankind, and to this we had come, through Science that would not look within, through a feminism that had sought new, and the progressive aims of ethical doctrinaires that had discarded the old safeguards; Christ’s light yoke of well-tried moral laws, sufficient to centuries; through all the fanatic votaries of a mechanistic creed; polygamy and mutilation, and all the shameful things from which the race had struggled through suffering upward. All the old evils which we had thought exorcised forever had crept in on us again, out of the shadows where they had lain concealed. I stood there, sick with horror, clinging to the rail.