stupendous whirl of deviltry, that the clerks he sees in Broadway or
Piccadilly at night are out for revels that would have caused protests
in Sodom and Nineveh, that the average man who chooses hell
leads an existence comparable to that of a Mormon bishop, that the
world outside the Bible class is packed like a sardine-can with
betrayed salesgirls, that every man who doesn't believe that Jonah
swallowed the whale spends his whole leisure leaping through the
seventh hoop of the Decalogue. "If I were not saved and anointed
of God," whispers the vice director into his own ear, "that is what I,
the Rev. Dr. Jasper Barebones, would be doing. The late King
David did it; he was human, and hence immoral. The late King
Edward VII was not beyond suspicion: the very numeral in his
name has its suggestions. Millions of others go the same route. . . .
Ergo, Up, guards, and at'em! Bring me the pad of blank warrants!
Order out the seachlights and scaling-ladders! Swear in four
hundred more policemen! Let us chase these hell-hounds out of
Christendom, and make the world safe for monogamy, poor
working girls, and infant damnation!"


Thus the hound of heaven, arguing fallaciously from his own secret
aspirations. Where he makes his mistake is in assuming that the
unconsecrated, while sharing his longing to debauch and betray, are
free from his other weaknesses, e.g., his timidity, his lack of
resourcefulness, his conscience. As I have said, they are not. The
vast majority of those who appear in the public haunts of sin are
there, not to engage in overt acts of ribaldry, but merely to tremble
agreeably upon the edge of the abyss. They are the same skittish
experimentalists, precisely, who throng the midway at a world's fair,
and go to smutty shows, and take in sex magazines, and read the