Page:Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory, 1922.djvu/284

The Secret Glory 'hard-headed, practical man of the world,' 'the descendant of the sturdy Puritans,' whose judgment is final on all questions from Poetics to Liturgiology. We hardly think that this picture will commend itself to the 'man in the street'—a course of action that is calculated to alienate practical men. Pleasant, isn't it? Suburbia locuta est: causa finita est.

"I suppose that, by nature, these people would not be so very much more depraved than the ordinary African black fellow. Their essential hideousness comes, I take it, from their essential and most abominable hypocrisy. You know how they are always prating about Bible Teaching—the 'simple morality of the Gospel,' and all that nauseous stuff? And what would be the verdict, in this suburban world, on a man who took no thought for the morrow, who regulated his life by the example of the lilies, who scoffed at the idea of saving money? You know perfectly well that his relations would have him declared a lunatic. There is the villainy. If you are continually professing an idolatrous and unctuous devotion to a body of teaching which you are also persistently and perpetually disregarding and disobeying in its plainest, most simple, most elementary injunctions, well, you will soon interest anglers in search of bait.

"Yes, such is the world behind the india-rubber 268