“Pilgrims in search of enlightenment,” Julian said, smiling.
“We get five or six of those a day,” the woman said. “Pilgrims are cheap as fleas around here. Sit down, I’ll find out if he has time for you.”
She vanished through another door, and we perched ourselves on the small bench that was the only available seat. A few pamphlets had been left on the rough pine table in front of us.
The Evolving God was the title of one. “He takes an interest in Evolution,” I said. “That’s unusual for a clergyman.”
“I doubt he knows what he’s talking about. These impostors seldom do.”
“But perhaps he’s sincere.”
“Even worse,” said Julian.
Then the adjoining door opened, and Pastor Stepney himself came into the room.
He was a handsome man. Mrs. Comstock and Calyxa had already testified to that effect, and I could not say they were wrong. Stepney was a tall, slender youth—he looked no older than Julian—with lustrously dark skin and wiry hair. But his most arresting feature was his eyes, which were penetrating, opulent, and of a shade so dark it was almost umber. He gave us a benevolent smile and said in a soothing voice, “How can I help you boys? Come for some spiritual wisdom, have you? I’m at your service, as long as you don’t forget the donation-box on the way out.”
Julian stood up at once. His demeanor had utterly changed. His eyes grew wide with astonishment. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Of all the Stepneys in New York City—is that you , Magnus?”
“Magnus Stepney, yes,” the pastor said, backing off warily.
“Don’t you know me, Magnus? Though we’re both years older now!”
The young pastor frowned a moment more; then his own eyes expanded in astonishment. “Julian!” he cried, a grin breaking out on his face. “Julian Comstock, by the grace of God! But aren’t you President now?”
* * *
It took me a while to sort out this unexpected development, but I won’t compel the reader to share my own confusion. It was obvious that Julian and Stepney had met before, and from listening to their conversation I garnered a few salient facts.
Stepney invited us into his sanctuary—which was the greater part of the warehouse loft, fixed up with benches and a makeshift altar—so that we could talk more comfortably. I use the collective “we,” but in fact it was Julian and the pastor who talked—I kept out of it. They had embarked on a series of reminiscences even before Julian remembered to introduce me.
“This is Magnus Stepney, an old acquaintance of mine,” he said eventually. “Magnus, this is Adam Hazzard, another friend.”
Pastor Stepney shook my hand, and his grip was strong and genial. “Pleased to meet you, Adam. Are you also some high functionary in the Executive Branch, operating in disguise?”
“No, just a writer,” I said.
Julian explained that he had gone to school with this man (boy, in those days) before he was sent to Williams Ford to protect him from his uncle. The school they had attended was a Eupatridian institution in which bright Aristo children were taught whatever it was considered decorous to know about arithmetic and literature. Julian and Magnus had been fast friends, I gathered, and a continual terror to their overseers. Both had been intelligent in advance of their years and impudent in their relations with authority. The friendship had been prematurely severed by Julian’s evacuation to Athabaska, and Julian had lost track of his former acquaintance. “How on earth did you come to be a pastor of a scofflaw Church?” Julian asked.
“My father wouldn’t toady to the Senate in some conflict over a dockside property,” Stepney said, “and he was punished for it, and forced to flee to Mediterranean France for his own safety. My mother and I would have followed after a prudent time, but his ship was lost at sea. My mother was all the family I had after that, and smallpox took her in ’72. I was reduced to accepting any work I could find, or making it for myself.”
“And this is the result?” Julian asked. “The Church of the Apostles Etc.?”
“By a long and winding road, yes,” said Stepney.
He gave Julian an abbreviated account of those difficult years, while I listened with half an ear. I supposed all this meant that Pastor Stepney was a fraud, and his Church nothing more than a vehicle for extracting cash donations from gullible parishioners. But Stepney spoke modestly and apparently sincerely about his religious beliefs, and how they had moved him to create the apostate sect of which he was the master.
This caused Julian and Stepney to launch into a vigorous discussion of Theology, the Existence of God, Evolution by Natural Selection, and such topics as that, which I inferred had been the subject of their childhood conversations as well. I was necessarily left out of such talk, and I passed the time by looking over the crudely-printed pamphlets Pastor Stepney had left scattered about the place.
Between the pamphlets and the conversation I began to assemble an outline of Magnus Stepney’s unusual doctrines. He was a true apostate, in that he denied the legitimacy of the Dominion of Jesus Christ as a worldly power, and his ideas about God were profoundly unorthodox. God, he asserted, was not contained in any Book, but was a Voice, which every human being could hear (and which most of us chose to ignore). The common name of that voice was Conscience; but it was a God by any reasonable definition, Stepney claimed. What else could you call an Invisible Entity who said the same thing to members of every diverse branch of humanity, regardless of class, geography, or language? Because that Voice was not contained in any single mind, but experienced consistently by all sane minds, it must be more than merely human, and therefore a God.
Gods, the pamphlets asserted, were not supernatural beings, but tenuously living things, like ethereal plants, that evolved in concert with the human species. We were simply their medium—our brains and flesh the soil in which they sprouted and grew. There were other Gods beside Conscience; but Conscience was the one worth worshipping, because its commandments, if universally obeyed, would usher us into a veritable Eden of mutual trust and universal charity.
(I don’t offer these notions to the reader with my endorsement, but only as a sample of Magnus Stepney’s peculiar doctrines. At first encounter the ideas seemed to me both eccentric and alarming.) Julian’s discussion with Stepney covered much of the same ground, though at greater length. Julian was obviously entertained by these airy abstractions, and enjoyed pressing the pastor with logical objections, which Stepney, for his part, equally enjoyed parrying.
“But you’re a Philosopher!” Julian exclaimed at one point. “This is Philosophy, not Religion, since you rule out supernatural beings—you know that as well as I do!”
“I suppose it is Philosophy, looked at from one angle,” Stepney conceded. “But there’s no money in Philosophy, Julian. Religion is far more lucrative as a career.”
“Yes, until the Dominion takes your Church away. My mother and Adam’s wife were caught up in that trouble, you know.”
“Were they? Are they all right?” Stepney asked, with a concern that did not seem feigned.
“Yes; but only because I took them under my wing.”
“The President’s wing must be a reasonably reliable shelter.”
“Not as sturdy as it could be. Don’t you fear the Dominion at all, Magnus? You’d be in prison yourself, if you hadn’t escaped the raid.”
Pastor Stepney shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’m not the only unaffiliated church in town. The business is only dangerous when the Dominion is in a vindictive mood, and the Deacons take up these crusades just once or twice in a decade. A few weeks or months will pass; then they’ll declare the city sanctified, and the rogue Churches will spring up again like mushrooms after a rain.”