“Not a bit of it! Perhaps, he’s had too long a training with God, or else he’s a more hard-baked atheist than you; I don’t know. But three days later he came to me and told me that from the Catholic standpoint God cannot be brought into the matter, that the Church absolutely rejects and forbids the pantheistic hypothesis as heresy. In short, that this isn’t any legal, duly recognized God, supported by the authority of the Church, and that, as a priest, he must declare it false, perverse, and heretical. He talked very reasonably, did his Reverence.”

“So he wasn’t conscious of any supernatural manifestations down there?”

“He underwent them all: illuminations, miraculous powers, ecstasy, everything. He doesn’t deny, either, that these things happen there.”

“Well, then, tell me, how does he explain it?”

“He simply doesn’t. He said that the Church does not explain, but merely prescribes or prohibits. In short, he definitely refused to compromise the Church with any new and untried God. At least, that’s what I understood him to mean. Do you know that I’ve bought that church up on the White Mountain?”

“Why?”

“It’s the nearest one to Břevnov. It cost me three hundred thousand, man. Both in writing and by word of mouth I offered it to the Absolute down in the cellar to induce it to move over there. It’s quite a pretty baroque church; and besides, I expressed my readiness to undertake any necessary alterations. And here’s a queer thing: just a few steps from the church, at No. 457, there was a fine case of ecstasy the night before last—one of our erectors; but in the church itself nothing miraculous happened, nothing whatever. There was even one case right out in Vokovice and two in Košiře, while at the Petřin wireless station there’s practically an epidemic of religion. All the wrieless operators on duty up there are sending out ecstatic messages of their own accord, a sort of new gospel to the world at large: God coming down again to the earth to ransom it, and so forth. Just imagine the scandal! Now the progressive papers are going for the Post Office, and the fur’s fairly flying. They’re screaming about Clericalism showing its horns, and rubbish of that kind. Nobody as yet suspects that this has any connection with the Karburator. Marek,” Bondy added in a whisper, “I’ll tell you something, but it’s a dead secret. A week ago it attacked our Minister for War.”

“Whom!” cried Marek.