Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/17

 Those who think, for instance, that the thing called superstition is something heavily artificial, are very numerous; that is those who think that it has only been the power of priests or of some very deliberate system that has built up boundaries, that has called one course of action lawful and another unlawful, that has called one piece of ground sacred and another profane. Nothing it would seem, except a large and powerful conspiracy could account for men so strangely distinguishing between one field and another, between one city and another, between one nation and another. To all those who think in this way there is only one answer to be given. It is to approach each of them and whisper in his ear: "Did you or did you not as a child try to step on every alternate paving-stone?" Was that artificial and a superstition? Did priests come in the dead of night and mark out by secret signs the stones on which you were allowed to tread? Were children threatened with the oubliette or the fires of Smithfield if they failed to step on the right stone? Has the Church issued a bull "Quisquam non pavemento?" No! On this point on which we were really free, we invented our servitude. We chose to say that between the first and the third paving-stone there was an abyss of the eternal darkness into which we must not fall. We were walking along a steady, and safe and modern road, and it was more pleasant to us to say that we were leaping desperately from peak to peak. Under mean and oppressive systems it was no doubt our instinct to free ourselves. But this truth written on the paving-stones is of even