I can
even remember sitting behind D... and saying some rude thing or
other over his shoulder. I don't remember why I gave it up but I did
quite suddenly; and I think the push may have come from a young
workman who was educating himself between Morris and Karl Marx. He
had planned a history of the navy and when I had spoken of the
battleship of Nelson's day, had said: 'Oh, that was the decadence of
the battleship,' but if his naval interests were mediaeval, his
ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in
perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of
almost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got
upon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all
the arrogance of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or
some such words, and yet there must be a change of heart and only
religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some near
revolution putting all things right, when the change must come, if
come it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun
or, it may have been, like the drying of the moon? Morris rang his
chairman's bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had to ring
it a second time before I sat down.
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