make so little of him. If you cannot send him out to lecture on Salisbury Plain, you might consider the propriety of sticking him up among the mummies or the Assyrian tablets in the British Museum. If you could only tell me where he is, I could go and "heckle" him, and he might explain to me not a few of the questions which I am now, reluctantly, pestering you with. He had no beginning and you had no beginning. So, before you took it into your head to "create" the heavens and the earth, there was a Melchisedek. He was King of Salem centuries before Salem existed; so he possibly walked to and fro on the earth millions of years before the earth was "created." When Melchisedek and you had high jinks together before the world was, where was I? Was I simply a bee in Melchizedek's bonnet? or where did you keep the large quantity of nothing out of which you subsequently "created" the world and me? Would it not have been as well to have done me the honour to ask me whether I had any desire to be "created".? If you had explained to me that the "creating" of me and things like me would have caused you and your family so much trouble and annoyance, including your bother in getting up the Flood and the fatigue your son was put to in flying down here and flying back to heaven again, I should have politely declined to be "created" at all. I do not care to put gods and the like to trouble on my account. If you had explained to me that you intended to "create" me a sort of tub that could stand upon its own bottom, I might have consented to be "created." But you have fashioned me into an automatic squirrel, revolving in my wheel forever, cracking my nuts, and indulging in my silly chattering and squeals while I am shut in from the pleroma of the Universe by the cage of the Esoteric with its bars of Mystery. You have made nearly all men, O Lord, dull owls, that eat much and think nothing and believe the incredible. And, for your glory and amusement, you have made a restless and sporadic few who eat little and think much, and whose brain-hammers ever clang upon the anvil of Fate, amid sweat and fire, forging empirical keys to turn the bolt of the lock of the Unknowable. O had I been blest with the stupidity
