though he crushed the French into a compost of blood and rags,
ground them by taxation into paupers, jested at dying children, and lied
most foully, and his minor imitators are dubbed criminals and thieves?
Look here, now, young man! If you, by a quiet, firm, indomitable
determination succeed in crushing out and stamping out forever this
secret society here, it will redound to your infinite credit in all
men's eyes. But mark, if with all your energy and zeal you fail, or if
you pass into a leaderette in some Freemason journal, and your zeal is
held up as fanaticism and your energy as imprudence, the whole world
will regard you as a hot-headed young fool, and will ask with rage and
white lips, What is the Bishop doing in allowing these young men to take
the reins into their own hands and drive the chariot of the sun? It is
as great a crime to be a young man to-day as it was in the days of Pitt.
Nothing can redeem the stigma and the shame but success. Of course, all
this sounds very pagan, and I am not identifying myself with it. I
believe with that dear barefooted philosopher, St. Francis, who is to me
more than fifty Aristotles, as a Kempis is more than fifty Platos, that
a man is just what he is in the eyes of God, and no more. But I am only
submitting to you this speculative difficulty to keep your mind from
growing fallow these winter evenings. And don't be in a hurry to answer
it. I'll give you six months; and then you'll say, like the interlocutor
in a Christy Minstrel entertainment: 'I give it up.'"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: Chimera.]

CHAPTER XII

CHURCH IMPROVEMENTS

I am afraid Father Letheby is getting irritable. Perhaps he is studying
too hard, and I don't spare him there, for he has the makings of a
bishop in him; or perhaps it is that wretched coffee,--but he is losing
that beautiful equanimity and enthusiasm which made him so attractive.

"I cannot understand these people," he said to me, soon after his
adventure with the "boys." "Such a compound of devotion and irreverence,
meanness and generosity, cunning and child-like openness, was never
seen. When I give Holy Communion with you, sir, on Sunday morning, my
heart melts at the seraphic tenderness with which they approach the
altar. That striking of the breast, that eager look on their faces, and
that 'Cead mile failte, O Thierna!'[3] make me bless God for such a
people; but then they appear to be waiting for the last words of the _De
Prof