«And then there was Nationalism — the theory that the state you happen to be subject to is the only true god, and that all other states are false gods; that all these gods, true as well as false, have the mentality of juvenile delinquents; and that every conflict over prestige, power or money is a crusade for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The fact that such theories came, at a given moment of history, to be universally accepted is the best proof of Belial’s existence, the best proof that at long last He’d won the battle.»
«I don’t quite follow,» says Dr. Poole.
«But surely it’s obvious. Here you have two notions. Each is intrinsically absurd and each leads to courses of action that are demonstrably fatal. And yet the whole of civilised humanity decides, almost suddenly, to accept these notions as guides to conduct. Why? And at Whose suggestion, Whose prompting, Whose inspiration? There can be only one answer.»
«You mean, you think it was. . . it was the Devil?»
«Who else desires the degradation and destruction of the human race?»
«Quite, quite,» Dr. Poole agrees. «But all the same as a Protestant Christian, I really can’t. . .»
«Is that so?» says the Arch-Vicar sarcastically. «Then you know better than Luther, you know better than the whole Christian Church. Are you aware, sir, that from the second century onward no orthodox Christian believed that a man could be possessed by God? He could only be possessed by the Devil. And why did people believe that? Because the facts made it impossible for them to believe otherwise. Belial’s a fact, Moloch’s a fact, diabolic possession’s a fact.»
«I protest,» cries Dr. Poole. «As a man of science. . .»
«As a man of science you’re bound to accept the working hypothesis that explains the facts most plausibly. Well, what are the facts? The first is a fact of experience and observation — namely that nobody wants to suffer, wants to be degraded, wants to be maimed or killed. The second is a fact of history — the fact that, at a certain epoch, the overwhelming majority of human beings accepted beliefs and adopted courses of action that could not possibly result in anything but universal suffering, general degradation and wholesale destruction. The only plausible explanation is that they were inspired or possessed by an alien consciousness, a consciousness that willed their undoing and willed it more strongly than they were able to will their own happiness and survival.»
There is a silence.
«Of course,» Dr. Poole ventures at last to suggest, «those facts could be accounted for in other ways.»
«But not so plausibly, not nearly so simply,» insists the Arch-Vicar. «And then consider all the other evidence. Take the First World War, for example. If the people and the politicians hadn’t been possessed, they’d have listened to Benedict XV or Lord Lansdowne — they’d have come to terms, they’d have negotiated a peace without victory. But they couldn’t, they couldn’t. It was impossible for them to act in their own self-interest. They had to do what the Belial in them dictated — and the Belial in them wanted the Communist Revolution, wanted the Fascist reaction to that revolution, wanted Mussolini and Hitler and the Politburo, wanted famine, inflation and depression; wanted armaments as a cure for unemployment; wanted the persecution of the Jews and the Kulaks; wanted the Nazis and the Communists to divide Poland and then go to war with one another.
Yes, and He wanted the wholesale revival of slavery in its most brutal form. He wanted forced migrations and mass pauperization. He wanted concentration camps and gas chambers and cremation ovens. He wanted saturation bombing (what a deliciously juicy phrase!). He wanted the destruction overnight of a century’s accumulation of wealth and all the potentialities of future prosperity, decency, freedom and culture. Belial wanted all this and, being the Great Blowfly in the hearts of the politicians and generals, the journalists and the Common Man, He was easily able to get the Pope ignored even by Catholics, to have Lansdowne condemned as a bad patriot, almost a traitor.
And so the war dragged on for four whole years; and afterward everything went punctually according to Plan. The world situation went steadily from bad to worse, and as it worsened, men and women became progressively more docile to the leadings of the Unholy Spirit. The old beliefs in the value of the individual soul faded away; the old restraints lost their effectiveness; the old compunctions and compassions evaporated. Everything that the Other One had ever put into people’s heads oozed out, and the resulting vacuum was filled by the lunatic dreams of Progress and Nationalism. Granted the validity of those dreams, it followed that mere people, living here and now, were no better than ants and bedbugs and might be treated accordingly. And they were treated accordingly, they most certainly were!»
The Arch-Vicar chuckles shrilly and helps himself to the last of the trotters.
«For his period,» he continues, «old man Hitler was a pretty good specimen of a demoniac. Not so completely possessed, of course, as many of the great national leaders in the years between 1945 and the beginning of the Third World War, but definitely above the average of his own time. More than almost any of his contemporaries, he had a right to say, ‘Not I, but Belial in me.’ The others were possessed only in spots, only at certain times. Take the scientists, for example. Good, well-meaning men, for the most part. But He got hold of them all the same — got hold of them at the point where they ceased to be human beings and became specialists. Hence, the glanders and those bombs. And then remember that man — what was his name? — the one that was President of the United States for such a long time. . . .»
«Roosevelt?» suggests Dr. Poole.
«That’s it — Roosevelt. Well, do you recall that phrase he kept repeating through the whole of the Second World War? ‘Unconditional surrender, unconditional surrender.’ Plenary inspiration — that’s what that was. Direct and plenary inspiration!»
«You say so,» demurs Dr. Poole. «But what’s your proof?»
«The proof?» repeats the Arch-Vicar. «The whole of subsequent history is the proof. Look at what happened when the phrase became a policy and was actually put into practice. Unconditional surrender — how many millions of new cases of tuberculosis? How many millions of children forced to be thieves or prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate? Belial was particularly pleased about the children. And again, unconditional surrender — the ruin of Europe, the chaos in Asia, the starvation everywhere, the revolutions, the tyrannies. Unconditional surrender — and more innocents had to undergo worse suffering than at any other period in history. And, as you know very well, there’s nothing that Belial likes better than the suffering of innocents. And finally, of course, there was the Thing. Unconditional surrender and bang! — just as He’d always intended. And it all happened without any miracle or special intervention, merely by natural means. The more one thinks about the workings of His Providence, the more unfathomably marvellous it seems.» Devoutly, the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns. There is a little pause. «Listen,» he says, holding up his hand.
For a few seconds they sit without speaking. The dim, blurred monotone of the chant swells into audibility. «Blood, blood, blood, the blood. . .» There is a faint cry as yet another little monster is spitted on the Patriarch’s knife, then the thudding of bulls’ pizzles on flesh and, through the excited roaring of the congregation, a succession of loud, scarcely human screams.
«You’d hardly think he could have produced us without a miracle,» the Arch-Vicar thoughtfully continues. «But He did, He did. By purely natural means, using human beings and their science as His instruments, He created an entirely new race of men, with deformity in their blood, with squalor all around them and ahead, in the future, no prospects but of more squalor, worse deformity and, finally, complete extinction. Yes, it’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living Evil.»
«Then why,» asks Dr. Poole, «do you go on worshiping Him?»
«Why do you throw food to a growling tiger? To buy yourself a breathing space. To put off the horror of the inevitable, if only for a few minutes. In earth as it is in Hell — but at least one’s still on earth.»
«It hardly seems worth while,» says Dr. Poole in the philosophical tone of one who has just dined.
Another unusually piercing scream makes him turn his head toward the door. He watches for a while in silence. This time, his expression is one in which horror has been considerably mitigated by scientific curiosity.
«Getting used to it, eh?» says the Arch-Vicar genially.
NARRATOR
Conscience, custom — the first makes cowards,
Makes saints of us sometimes, makes human beings.
The other makes Patriots, Papists, Protestants,
Makes Babbitts, Sadists, Swedes or Slovaks,
Makes killers of Kulaks, chlorinators of Jews,
Makes all who mangle, for lofty motives,
Quivering flesh, without qualm or question
To mar their certainty of Supreme Service.
Yes, my friends, remember how indignant you once felt when the Turks massacred more than the ordinary quota of Armenians, how you thanked God that you lived in a Protestant, progressive country, where such things simply couldn’t happen — couldn’t happen because men wore bowler hats and travelled daily to town by the eight twenty-three. And then reflect for a moment on a few of
