consciousness in ignorance of what has happened. Presently she finds herself with child and believes and persuades her parents that a miracle has taken place, and gradually the neighbours believe also and turn good. At last she dies bringing forth a girl-child; and the tramp arrives in the village knowing nothing of what has happened, gets drunk and boasts of his crime.
This story roused as much horror as the Cherry Tree Carol. Yet countless obscure mothers have so dreamed, have been so deceived; some of them born in Protestant communities have become Johanna Southcotts and lost our sympathy; but if we imagine such a mother as a simple country girl living amongst settled opinions, the theme grows emotional and philosophical. I have myself a scenario upon that theme which I shall never turn into a play because I cannot write dialect well enough, and if I were to set it where my kind of speech is possible, it would become unreal or a mere conflict of opinion. Mr. Lennox Robinson and I want to understand the Incarnation, and we think that we cannot understand any historical event till we have set it amidst new circumstance. We grew up with the story of the Bible; the Mother of God is no Catholic possession; she is a part of our imagination.
VI
The Irish Religious Press attacked Mr. Lennox Robinson and a Catholic Ecclesiastic, and an Ecclesiastic of the Church of Ireland resigned from the Committee of the Carnegie Library, of which Mr. Lennox Robinson was secretary, because it would not censure him. I think that neither the Irish Religious Press nor those Ecclesiastics believe in the Second Coming. I do not believe in it—at least not in its Christian form—and I know that I do not believe, but they think that they do. No minds have belief who, confronted with its consequences—Johanna Southcotts, deluded peasant girls and all the
