Page 304 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

same tone, if you feel sure that our religion is false and that
Jesus was not the son of God?
—I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like
a son of God than a son of Mary.
—And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly
asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel
that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of
God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it
may be?
—Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.
—I see, Cranly said.
Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the dis-
cussion at once by saying:
—I fear many things: dogs, horses, fire-arms, the sea,
thunder-storms, machinery, the country roads at night.
—But why do you fear a bit of bread?
—I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent real-
ity behind those things I say I fear.
—Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the
Roman catholics would strike you dead and damn you if
you made a sacrilegious communion?
—The God of the Roman catholics could do that now,
Stephen said. I fear more than that the chemical action
which would be set up in my soul by a false homage to a
symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of au-
thority and veneration.
—Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit
that particular sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the
penal days?

304 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man