A SERMON BY DOCTOR PEP
461
the Carpenter to begin with. The Walrus was sorry for the poor
oysters. The carpenter ate without caring. But both of them wept
like anything to see such quantities of sand. Why did they? Because
civilization is never complete enough? In dead earnest, it is profound.
The sand remains in spite of the maids and the mops.
It
creeps
back. And the fish of first-times loiters offshore somewhere near our
loftier thoughts. Each new generation has to be tamed to manners
and tamed more than its remotest ancestor. The snakes have to be
made to come and braid themselves symmetrical into the healer's
caduceus, forsaking poison for benevolence, and everything lay itself
out harmonious and nice.
But as the subjugation goes on and the City of Man arises, the
martyrs multiply faster and faster. Such work cannot go forward
without firm and earnest purpose, seriousness and hardness, and the
proof of such by willingness to make sacrifices. Here the martyrs
come in'. There is no power without them, they must swarm. The
young knight Curtius who threw himself horse and all into the gap
in the Forum, there is your cleanest and simplest example, as the
story makes it happen by heroic consent. The boys of best breeding
the Mexican priests took the hearts from, there's another; or Iphi–
genia under the knife of her curl-bearded father, offered up for the
sake of the bedoldrummed fleet. Still not like later excess. The mops
of the maids are of human hair, and still the sand gathers and
gathers. Beautiful Versailles and the shaped trees of Fontainebleau
fed the dream of Robespierre, prepared to murder millions of his
countrymen to see it real. And were the fierce moppers of Auschwitz
inspired by their squared and polished home towns and the pleasant
embroidery of the regulated Rhine? Remember, Baal w,as the lord
of cultivation and humanized land, and he was the greatest danger
to the desert-bred generation, in the eyes of Moses.
But I have to give over now, for I see Dr. Johannes waiting
to address you on the single-tax and interpret the message of Henry
George. I have only another word on gentleness, which for me is in
the patriarch Abraham ready to take the life of Isaac on the angry
mountain. He was tried where he was tenderest to learn what the
worst was that indulgent love had to be ready for. Inhumane, the
old man? Not for me. Not he. Not when he looked at the bone–
enclosed head beside him, the mysterious shape between the boy's
