Of course, the Church of England was a crumbling ruin. Pullman wondered how Philip could be so dense. Anyway, the churches are all empty now, so why do you care?" "What gives you the right to correct everybody, Pullman? You should get the knot out of your own shorts before you go yanking threads from other people's. And in fact he considered it unkind to kick other people's crutches out from under them. He often found himself humming tunes from Hymns Ancient and Modern. Like Pullman, Philip was an atheist, but he understood the appeal of faith. "Not all religious people are bad," said Philip, who had fond memories of their grandfather, a Church of England priest. They're so sure that priests and popes have the key to some secret mythical knowledge that they give up thinking for themselves." "Everywhere you look these days, you see people cowed by authority. "Think of the good your novels could do, the freedom they could bring to so many," he told Philip. He liked stories, too, but thought they ought to serve a Greater Purpose. The older brother, Pullman, became a teacher and a champion of human liberty. He had a gift for describing the natural world without sentimentalizing it. The younger brother, Philip, became a storyteller. Once there were two brothers from Norwich. Sometimes it reads like fairy tale and at other times like a product of Google Translate. The following is a story that attempts to show how a recent novel could have happened.
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