Baveno, join the group, Father Stanley among
them. In the chapel of the villa he, by way of a sermon, gives them a
sort of address on the social problems of the time; and this throughout
has reference to the sort of ideas or projects of which the heroine had
already spoken to him.

He takes for his text the following words from St. James: "Go to now, ye
rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
Behold, the hire of the laborers, which is of you kept back by fraud,
crieth. If a brother or sister be destitute, and if any of you say to
them, 'Depart in peace'; notwithstanding ye give not them those things
needful for the body, what doth it profit? To him that knoweth to do
good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." The priest then proceeds to
the question of what virtue and duty are. "To this," he says, "there are
two answers. The first is, that virtue and duty have for their object
God. The second answer is, that their object is our fellow men and the
health of the social organism, while our inducement to practice them is
in part the constant teasing of the tribal instinct or conscience, and
in part our imaginative sympathies, as stimulated by a glow of emotion
which is consequent on our contemplation of idealized Humanity as a
whole. Within certain limits," he says, "this second answer I take to be
entirely right; but if there were nothing further to add, I maintain
that it would be right in vain." Summing up the ideas of the heroine,
Miss Consuelo Burton, he says that the main duty which the Church to-day
enjoins on us is "our spiritual duty to the material conditions of the
poor"--our duty to adorn the cottage, though not to destroy the castle.
"Duty to the race as a substitute for duty to God is," he says, "worth
nothing. It means nothing. But duty to the race regarded as a new and
more definite interpretation of our duty to God is a conception which to
us Catholics of the present day means everything. Though it relates to
material things, it does not supersede spiritual. On the contrary, it
represents the spiritual world taking the material world into itself as
its minister, and the Catholic who realizes this will find that the
echoes of the mass and of the confessional follow him into the street
and mix themselves with the clatter of omnibuses. If any of you think
that he or she individually can do little, after all, to alter the
general condition of things, let them not be thereby dishearten