Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/330

308 womb and his creation obeys. There is the whole mystery—God, in the indignity of human birth, all that seemed impossible, blasphemous even, to many early heretical sects and all set forth in an old 'sing-song' that has yet a mathematical logic. I have thought it out again and again and I can see no reason for the anger of the Christian Brothers, except that they do not believe in the Incarnation. They think they believe in it, but they do not, and its sudden presentation fills them with horror, and to hide that horror they turn upon the poem.

The only thoughts that our age carries to their logical conclusion are deductions from the materialism of the seventeenth century; they fill the newspapers, books, speeches; they are implicit in all that we do and think. The English and Irish countrymen are devout because ignorant of these thoughts; but we, till we have passed our grain through the sieve, are atheists. I do not believe in the Incarnation in the Church's sense of that word, and I know that I do not, and yet, seeing that like most men of my kind these fifty years I desire belief, the old Carol and all similar Art delights me. But the Christian Brothers think that they believe, and suddenly confronted with the reality of their own thought cover up their eyes.

Some months ago Mr. Lennox Robinson gave to a paper edited by young poets a story written in his youth. A religious young girl in the West of Ireland, her meditations stirred perhaps by her own name of Mary, begins to wonder what would happen if Christ's Second Coming were in her own village. She thinks first that the people are so wicked they would reject him, and then that they might accept him and grow good. She is pursued by a tramp, becomes unconscious, is ravished and returns to