It is only, therefore, with much diffidence
that I have decided to give a _resume_ of opinions many of which those
whom I alone wish to please will have laid to heart from their youth
upwards. In brief, Dr. Gurgoyle's contention comes to little more than
saying that the quick are more dead, and the dead more quick, than we
commonly think. To be alive, according to him, is only to be unable to
understand how dead one is, and to be dead is only to be invincibly
ignorant concerning our own livingness--for the dead would be as living
as the living if we could only get them to believe it.
CHAPTER XI: PRESIDENT GURGOYLE'S PAMPHLET "ON THE PHYSICS OF VICARIOUS
EXISTENCE"
Belief, like any other moving body, follows the path of least resistance,
and this path had led Dr. Gurgoyle to the conviction, real or feigned,
that my father was son to the sun, probably by the moon, and that his
ascent into the sky with an earthly bride was due to the sun's
interference with the laws of nature. Nevertheless he was looked upon as
more or less of a survival, and was deemed lukewarm, if not heretical, by
those who seemed to be the pillars of the new system.
My father soon found that not even Panky could manipulate his teaching
more freely than the Doctor had done. My father had taught that when a
man was dead there was an end of him, until he should rise again in the
flesh at the last day, to enter into eternity either of happiness or
misery.
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