Religious Instruction

This misalliance follows the custom for female children To adhere to maternal practices While the atheist father presides over the prattle of the churchgoer with ironical commentary from his arm-chair But by whichever religious route to brute reality our forebears speed us There is often a pair of idle adult accomplices in duplicity to impose upon their brood an assumed acceptance of the grace of God defamed as human megalomania seeding the Testament with inconcievable chastisement and of Christ who come with his light of toilless lilies To say "fear not it is I" wanting us to be fearful He who bowed the ocean tossed with holy feet which supposedly dead are suspended over head neat- ly crossed in anguish wounded with red varnish From these slow-drying bloods of mysticism mysteriously the something-soul emerges miserably and instinct (of economy) in every race for reconstructing debris has planted an avenging face in outer darkness . . . The lonely peering eye of humanity looked into the Néant and turned away . . . Ova's consciousness impulsive to commit itself to justice —to arise and walk its innate straight way out of the accidence of circumstance— collects the levitate chattels of its will and makes for the magnetic horizon of liberty with the soul's foreverlasting opposition to disintegration So this child of Exodus with her heritage of emigration often "sets out to seek her fortune" in her turn trusting to terms of literature dodging the breeders' determination not to return "entities sent on consignment" by their maker Nature except in a condition of moral effacement Lest Paul and Peter never notice the creatures ever had had Fathers and Mothers They were disgraced in their duty should such spirits take an express passage through the family bodies to arrive at Eternity as lovely as they originally promised So on whatever days she chose to "run away" the very street corners of Kilburn close in upon Ova to deliver her into the hands of her procreators Oracle of civilization ‘Thou shalt not live by dreams alone but by every discomfort that proceedeth out of legislation'