The Free Thought Society assembled in Basle. In the presence of two thousand delegates the Absolute was proclaimed as the God of the Freethinkers, and this was followed by an incredibly violent attack upon clerics of all denominations, who, in the terms of the resolution, “are eager to seek their own advantage with the one scientific God and to drag Him down into the filthy cage of ecclesiastical dogma and priestly deception, and leave Him there to starve.” But the God who has made Himself manifest to the eyes of every progressive modern thinker “has nothing to do with the mediæval traffic of these Pharisees; the Free Thought Association alone is His congregation, and only the Basle Congress has the right to set forth the doctrine and the ritual of the Free Religion.”

At about the same time the German Monist Association laid in Leipzig, with great pomp and ceremony, the foundation-stone of the future Cathedral of the Atomic God. There was some disturbance, in which sixteen persons were injured and Lüttgen, the famous physicist, had his spectacles smashed.

News was also received that autumn of some religious phenomena in the Belgian Congo and in French Senegambia. The negroes quite unexpectedly slaughtered and ate the missionaries and bowed down to a new idol which they called Ato or Alolto. It afterwards appeared that these idols were atomic motors, and that German officers and agents were in some way implicated in the matter. On the other hand, during the Moslem rising which broke out at Mecca in December of the same year, several French emissaries were found to have been present, who had concealed twelve light atomic motors of the Aero pattern in the neighbourhood of the Kaaba. The ensuing rebellion of the Mohammedans in Egypt and Tripoli, and the massacres in Arabia, cost the lives of about thirty thousand Europeans.

The deification of the Absolute was at length accomplished in Rome on the twelfth of December.

Seven thousand priests with lighted candles escorted the Holy Father to St. Peter’s, where the largest twelve-ton Karburator, a gift from the M.E.C. to the Holy See, had been erected behind the high altar. The ceremony lasted five hours, and twelve hundred of the faithful and the spectators were crushed to death. At the stroke of noon, the Pope intoned the “In nomine Dei Deus,” and at the same moment the bells of all the Catholic churches in the world were set ringing as all the bishops and priests turned from the altars and announced to the world of believers: “Habemus Deum.”

XX. St. Kilda

CHAPTER XX

ST. KILDA