Such Men Are Dangerous by Stephen Benatar Read Free Book Online Page A

people begin by holding it cheap, no amount of endorsement later on is going to compensate. You wouldn’t even get endorsement later on. The Church would treat it no more seriously than anybody else.”
    “So easily influenced?” bemoaned Josh.
    “But why can’t you go to the Archbishop direct?”
    “Because he, too, is only human. He, too, is going to need convincing. By the people closest to him, whose judgment he respects.”
    “God will convince him,” said Dawn.
    “Yes, but God may wish to do so through advisers,” responded Simon, every bit as firmly.
    “Why?”
    “Who knows? But you could just as easily ask why the angel who came to your sons didn’t go straight to the Archbishop.”
    “Or straight to you,” suggested Michael.
    Josh stretched himself, happily. “Of course, you can’t be wholly sure, can you, that he didn’t in fact pop in on His Grace? Remember, now: the time was about four. He might have thought he’d get a classier tea at Lambeth Palace than either here or even, with respect, at the vicarage. Or, again, couldn’t London be in the jurisdiction of some different angel? Yes, that might be the answer: the beat, let’s say, of the Islington Angel. Perhaps there’s a plethora of angels. All sorts of exciting possibilities.”
    Simon laughed with genuine enjoyment; realized it would have been more tactful not to, when he glanced at Dawn. Probably only St Paul’s strict injunctions on womanhood had prevented her from interrupting, or from rebuking her husband a moment ago when he had stretched.
    Josh became more serious. It might well have been from kindness.
    “And after you’ve been to see the home team, what then?”
    “Well, next I’ll approach those experts in the Church of England who have special knowledge of mystical experiences and/or of nuclear weapons.” He smiled. “I’d chiefly want to interest those sceptical about the first and in favour of the second. To win some of them to our side would wonderfully strengthen our position.”
    “You talk as though it needed strengthening,” said Dawn. Unfairly, Simon found the woman of faith more irritating than the man without it. He said:
    “I know we’re going to win through eventually. I just don’t believe it will be easy.”
    “What happens,” asked William, “if in the end the Archbishop still isn’t convinced?”
    “He will be,” stated Dawn.
    “Yes, your mother’s right. It can’t be God’s will for him not to be.” Simon paused. “Unless, of course, he has some other purpose in mind—God, that is—at which we can’t begin to guess.”
    Josh was surveying his fingernails.
    “Like, you mean, keeping himself indefinitely amused? And us, as well: we lucky ones who can appreciate the comedy. Do you know something, vicar? I begin for the first time to feel a spiritual lack in my life. This, surely, would be a God after my own heart.”
    “Excuse me.” Dawn, whom even St Paul couldn’t always hold in check, stood up and left the room.
    “Oh dear. Might I have spoken out of turn?” Josh gave a chastened grin. “Poor old Dawnie; she could never take being ribbed.”
    “Then why do you think you can change her?”
    “Why do you think I can change myself?”
    “I’m not sure if I do. I don’t feel that you want to.”
    “Yet supposing I did?”
    “You implied just now you couldn’t.”
    “But how defeatist! Especially when proceeding from a gentleman of the cloth !”
    “Well, can a leopard change his spots?”
    “Worse and worse! And with a friendly sort of smile, as well! You seem almost—what do you seem?— glad .”
    Simon ignored this. “If you were to call on outside help, of course, then it could be altogether different. But that goes without saying.”
    “Says he, having said it. What was it you had in mind? A psychiatrist?”
    “No, not exactly.”
    “I know it wasn’t. You were thinking of That Big Psychiatrist in the Sky.”
    “Well, certainly he is that, amongst other