s more than
that--it is a light; and this inner light, faint at first, had not been
blown out. If he had blown it out, as many priests had done, he would
not have experienced any qualms of conscience. The other priests in the
diocese experienced none when they drove erring women out of their
parishes, and the reason of this was that they followed a light from
without, deliberately shutting out the light of the soul.

The question interested him, and he pondered it a long while, finding
himself at last forced to conclude that there is no moral law except
one's own conscience, and that the moral obligation of every man is to
separate the personal conscience from the impersonal conscience. By the
impersonal conscience he meant the opinions of others, traditional
beliefs, and the rest; and thinking of these things he wandered round
the Druid stones, and when his thoughts returned to Nora's special case
he seemed to understand that if any other priest had acted as he had
acted he would have acted rightly, for in driving a sinful woman out of
the parish he would be giving expression to the moral law as he
understood it and as Garranard understood it. This primitive code of
morals was all Garranard could understand in its present civilization,
and any code is better than no code. Of course, if the priest were a
transgressor himself he could not administer the law. Happily, that was
a circumstance that did not arise often. So it was said; but what did he
know of the souls of the priests with whom he dined, smoked pipes, and
played cards? And he stopped, surprised, for it had never occurred to
him that all a man knows of his fellow is whether he be clean or dirty,
short or tall, thin or stout. 'Even the soul of Moran is obscure to me,'
he said--'obscure as this wood;' and at that moment the mystery of the
wood seemed to deepen, and he stood for a long while looking through the
twilight of the hazels.

Very likely many of the priests he knew had been tempted by women: some
had resisted temptation, and some had sinned and repented. There might
be a priest who had sinned and lived for years in sin; even so if he
didn't leave his parish, if he didn't become an apostate priest, faith
would return to him in the end. But the apostate priest is anathema in
the eyes of the Church; the doctrine always has been that a sin matters
little if the sinner repent. Father Oliver suddenly saw himself years
hence, still in Garranard, administering