I did not see his real difficulty. After all, God, being omnipotent, could cause anything He liked. Itried to explain this to Uncle Axel, but he shook his head.
'We've got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We'd be lost indeed if we didn't do that. But
whatever happened out there'—he waved his hand round the horizon at large—'what happened there
was not sane—not sane at all. It was something vast, yet something beneath the wisdom of God. So
what was it? What can it have been?'
'But Tribulation—' I began.
Uncle Axel moved impatiently. 'A word,' he said, 'a rusted mirror, reflecting nothing. It'd do the
preachers good to see it for themselves. They'd not understand, but they might begin to think. They
might begin to ask themselves: "What are we doing? What are we preaching? What were the Old
People really like? What was it they did to bring this frightful disaster down upon themselves and all
the world?" And after a bit they might begin to say: "Are we right? Tribulation has made the world a
different place; can we, therefore, ever hope to build in it the kind of world the Old People lost?
Should we try to? What would be gained if we were to build it up again so exactly that it culminated
in another Tribulation?" For it is clear, boy, that however wonderful the Old People were, they were
not too wonderful to make mistakes—and nobody knows, or is ever likely to know, where they were
wise and where they were mistaken.'
Much of what he was saying went right over my head, but I thought I caught its gist. I said:
'But, Uncle, if we don't try to be like the Old People and rebuild the things that have been lost,
what can we do?'
'Well, we might try being ourselves, and build for the world that is, instead of for one that's
gone,' he suggested.
'I don't think I understand,' I told him. 'You mean not bother about the True Line or the True
Image? Not mind about Deviations?'
'Not quite that,' he said, and then looked sidelong at me. 'You heard some heresy from your aunt;
well, here's a bit more, from your uncle. What do you think it is that makes a man a man?'
I started on the Definition. He cut me off after five words.
'It is not!' he said. 'A wax figure could have all that, and he'd still be a wax figure, wouldn't he?'
'I suppose he would.'
'Well, then, what makes a man a man is something inside him.'
'A soul?' I suggested.
'No,' he said, 'souls are just counters for churches to collect, all the same value, like nails. No,
what makes man man is mind; it's not a thing, it's a quality, and minds aren't all the same value; they're
better or worse, and the better they are, the more they mean. See where we're going?'
'No,' I admitted.
'It's this way, Davie, I reckon the church people are more or less right about most deviations—
only not for the reasons they say. They're right because most deviations aren't any good. Say they did
allow a deviation to live like us, what'd be the good of it? Would a dozen arms and legs, or a couple
of heads, or eyes like telescopes give him any more of the quality that makes him a man? They would
not. Man got his physical shape—the true image, they call it—before he even knew he was man at all.
It's what happened inside, after that, that made him human. He discovered he had what nothing else
had, mind. That put him on a different level. Like a lot of the animals he was physically pretty nearly
as good as he needed to be; but he had this new quality, mind, which was only in its early stages, and
he developed that. That was the only thing he could usefully develop; it's the only way open to him—
to develop new qualities of mind.' Uncle Axel paused reflectively. 'There was a doctor on my second
ship who talked that way, and the more I got to thinking it over, the more I reckoned it was the way
that made sense. Now, as I see it, some way or another you and Rosalind and the others have got a
new quality of mind. To pray God to take it away is wrong; it's like asking Him to strike you blind, or
make you deaf. I know what you're up against, Davie, but funking it isn't the way out. There isn't an
easy way out. You have to come to terms with it. You'll have to face it and decide that, since that's the
way things are with you, what is the best use you can make of it and still keep yourselves safe?'
I did not, of course, follow him clearly through that the first time. Some of it stayed in my mind,
the rest of it I reconstructed in half-memory from later talks. I began to understand better later on,
particularly after Michael had gone to school.
Heresy Thread
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Originally Posted by Birdbrain
