"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the
view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and
all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect
allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began,
of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round
his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that
it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a
monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to
grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by
the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally
in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church
and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild
soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer
evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the
devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and
transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking,
for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings,
when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf
stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that
this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together
over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at
it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he
broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every
paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was
a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it
for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable
image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this,
too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed
plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He