"
"You don't feel the need of any kind of superior being to control human
affairs?"
"Not up to the present. I can find no room in my Cosmos for a deity,
save as a waste product of human weakness, an excrement of the
imagination. If you gave me the sauciest god that ever sat on a cloud
or breakfasted with the Village Idiot--'pon my word, I shouldn't know
what to do with him. I don't collect bric-a-brac myself, and the
British Museum is dreadfully overstocked. Perhaps the Duchess could
make some use of him, if he specialized in lace vestments and choral
mass. By the way, I hear that she is going to be admitted into the
Roman Church next week; there is to be a luncheon after the ceremony.
Are you going?"
"Vertical and horizontal gods. . . . I never heard that distinction
made before."
"It is a difference, my dear Heard. Mankind remains in direct contact
with the downstairs variety. That simplifies matters. But the peculiar
position of those others--perpendicularly overhead at a vast
distance--necessitates a troublesome code of verbal signals,
unintelligible to common folk, for the expression of mutual desires.
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