individual molecules be its creatures. And this God tells His creatures that it's all over ... no more purposes, no more action because there's no reason for it ... what then?"

"The molecules break down?" Facetiously.

"Exactly. And the atoms disperse and the electron shells fall away and what happens after that, I'm hardly prepared to say."

"Hardly." Amusedly now.

"Now back to man as man, not God, for the next. While you and your eager predecessors were pushing outward to the stars, I and mine were exploring cells. And we found cells dying from simple lack of faith ... or, you might say, from an excess of faith in purposes which had been abandoned. 'Our God said so and so' they insisted, long after their God had revised his plans to such and such."

"Changeable gods do not interest me." Boredly.

"I'm glad to hear it," I told him. "That's fairly important. The discovery part of this investigation, however, is that man does act as a god to his cells, can tell them things and know that they hear his still small voice. And among other things which man has to say to his cells is his promise of immortality to each and every one."

"That's going too far, I think," Father Phillip objected seriously. "The body dies."

"Man has a Precedent," I said quietly. "But," I added, "you have just told me that it was a number of bodily deaths which destroyed your faith in all pattern and purpose."

"Is that comparable?"

"Not only is it comparable ... it is, you might say, one of the myriad identical petals of the Mystic Rose. And it is the one I know something important about. You see, I have witnessed the immortality of the cell. That's my contribution to the journals, if not to the instruction of the world which doesn't read them."

"Oh, I know ... every cell that's alive is merely a daughter cell of one original cell, so that cell is immortal."

"I don't mean that at all, even though that's true. You might say that I mean I have seen the souls of 'dead' cells in heaven."

Incredulously: "Through the projecting microscope in the basement?"

"No, you don't see them with eyes or hear them with ears," I assured 

 Prev. P 6/9 next