Galapagos Regained by James Morrow

cataclysms,” replied the squirrelly Mr. Atkinson—Miss Martineau’s co-author—laying a hand on her sleeve. Try as he might, Malcolm could not fathom what virtues Miss Martineau saw in Atkinson, whose contributions to their collaboration must have been perfunctory at best. “Plagues and poxes. Toothaches and earthquakes.”
    A shudder traveled through Malcolm’s frame. Of all the classic disproofs of God, the problem of unmerited pain was the one he most feared. Merciful Father in Heaven, deliver us from the Argument from Evil.
    â€œMumps and mosquitoes,” said Mr. Holyoake, editor of The Oracle of Reason, genially joining the game. “Ticks and rickets. Tubercles and tumors.”
    It was obvious why the Byssheans had been drawn to Mr. Holyoake. Two years earlier, during one of his Socialist lectures, he’d noted that Her Majesty’s religious institutions were costing the Government £20,000,000 annually, even as the national debt hung like a millstone about the people’s collective neck. England, Holyoake suggested, was “too poor to have a God,” and it might be prudent “to put the Deity on half-pay until our finances are in order.” In Malcolm’s view the freethinker’s subsequent fate—six months in gaol for blasphemy—was unjust, for his remarks could hardly have offended God Almighty, who was after all not some prickly parson from Swindon but the Creator of the universe.
    The judges’ conversation was interrupted by the simultaneous arrivals of Popplewell of the Evening Standard, who took his customary seat in the ancient-history alcove, and Lippert, majordomo of Alastor Hall, who handed his master a slip of paper. Holding his goblet aloft like a torch, Lord Woolfenden rose from his divan—no simple operation, given his girth. (Everything about the man was excessive, his great stomach, froggish eyes, booming voice, prolix poems.) He tossed his mauve silk scarf insouciantly over his shoulder, glanced at Lippert’s note, and faced his fellow sybarites. “Taking the field on God’s behalf, we have the Reverend Terrance Sethington of Berkshire, who will attempt to sway the bench with a version of the Cosmological Proof.”
    The cleric in question, a towering figure with eyebrows so bushy they suggested caterpillars inching towards the ark, swaggered into the library pulling a child’s wagon whose cargo lay beneath a gauze veil. Self-confidence radiated from Mr. Sethington like warmth from a winter hearth, and Malcolm speculated that tonight, at long last, the entire bench might come to agree that God had been substantiated.
    Reaching under the veil, the petitioner drew forth a croquet mallet and a wooden sphere. “The Cosmological Proof is the soul of simplicity,” he began, setting the sphere on the floor. “As Thomas Aquinas reminds us, nothing moves of its own accord. We can stare night and day at this croquet ball, waiting for it to change position, and it won’t budge by a cricket’s whisker.” Mr. Sethington applied his mallet with a force considerably short of the supernatural but sufficient to send the sphere ricocheting off the dais. “None would doubt that my mallet moved the ball, that I moved the mallet, or that my impulses moved me. Ah, but what moved my impulses? And what moved that which moved my impulses? Learned judges, we have fallen into an infinite regress, an abyss from which we can escape only by assuming the existence of a divine agency. Saint Thomas reasoned that this Unmoved Mover is perforce the Creator-God of Christian revelation.”
    â€œEven when that Creator-God resembles a Berkshire parson playing croquet?” inquired Miss Martineau, eliciting from the Byssheans a peal of contemptuous laughter.
    â€œSaint Thomas pondered not only the problem of movement but also the riddle of causality,” said Sethington, undaunted. He returned to his wagon