an accusing energy that the Bishop of London was paid L12,000 a
year for pretending to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. It
was in vain that he hung in conspicuous places the most thrilling
scientific calculations about the width of the throat of a whale.
Was it nothing to them all they that passed by? Did his sudden
and splendid and truly sincere indignation never stir any of the
people pouring down Ludgate Hill? Never. The little man who
edited _The Atheist_ would rush from his shop on starlit evenings
and shake his fist at St. Paul's in the passion of his holy war
upon the holy place. He might have spared his emotion. The cross
at the top of St. Paul's and _The Atheist_ shop at the foot of it
were alike remote from the world. The shop and the Cross were
equally uplifted and alone in the empty heavens.

To the little man who edited _The Atheist_, a fiery little
Scotchman, with fiery, red hair and beard, going by the name of
Turnbull, all this decline in public importance seemed not so
much sad or even mad, but merely bewildering and unaccountable.
He had said the worst thing that could be said; and it seemed
accepted and ignored like the ordinary second best of the
politicians. Every day his blasphemies looked more glaring, and
every day the dust lay thicker upon them. It made him feel as if
he were moving in a world of idiots. He seemed among a race of
men who smiled when told of their own death, or looked vacantly
at the Day of Judgement. Year after year went by, and year after
year the death of God in a shop in Ludgate became a less and less
important occurrence. All the forward men of his age discouraged
Turnbull. The socialists said he was cursing priests when he
should be cursing capitalists. The artists said that the soul was
most spiritual, not when freed from religion, but when freed from