e thing, if you can be bound by honour to acquiesce in something
which you honestly believe to be base. It seems to me a case of what
Tennyson describes:

"'His honour rooted in dishonour stood,
And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.'"

"But surely social obligations must often conflict with private beliefs,"
said Rose. "A nation or a society has got to act collectively, and a
minority must be over-ridden."

"I quite agree," said Father Payne, "but why mix up honour with it at all?
I don't object to a man who conscientiously dissents to some national move
being told that he must lump it. But if he is called dishonourable for
dissenting, then honour does not seem to me to be a real word at all, but
only a term of abuse for a man who objects to some concerted plan. You
can't make a dishonest thing honest because a majority choose to do it--at
least I do not believe that morality is purely a matter of majorities, or
that the dishonour of one century can become the honour of the next. I am
inclined to believe just the opposite. I believe that the man who has so
sensitive a conscience about what is honourable or not, that he is called a
Quixotic fool by his contemporaries, is far more likely to be right than
the coarser majority who only see that a certain course is expedient. I
should believe that he saw some truth of morality clearly which the rougher
sort of minds did not see. The saint--call him what you like--is only the
man who stands higher up, and sees the sunrise before the people who stand
lower down."

"But everyone has a right to his own sense of honour," said Rose.

"Certainly," said Father Payne, "but you must be certain that a man's sense
of honour is lower than your own before you call him dishonourable for
differing from you. If a man is less scrupulous than myself, I may think
him dishonourable, if I also think that he knows better. But what I do not
think that any of us has a right to do is to call a man dishonourable if he
has more scruples than oneself. He may be over-scrupulous, but the chances
are that any man who sacrifices his convenience to a scruple has a higher
sense of honour than the man who throws over a scruple for the sake of his
convenience. That is why I think honour is a dangerous word to play with,
because it is so often used to frighten people who don't fall in with what
is for the convenience of a gang."

"But surely," said Rose, "morality is after all only a word for what