--everyone was now beginning to
hear of Lord Henry's wonderful success in dealing with such cases, and
he was getting inconveniently busy.

Only a few were perhaps aware that he derived most of his skill in the
handling of these nervous disorders from the teaching of a certain
Austrian Jew of brilliant genius; but even those who knew this fact also
recognised that he had shown such enormous ability in adapting the
principles of his Semitic master to modern English conditions that he
was entitled to be regarded quite as much as an innovator as a disciple.

What Lord Henry had done could have been accomplished only by an
Englishman of exceptional intelligence. He had discovered that the
almost universal feature of nervous abnormalities in England, which were
not the outcome of trauma or congenital disease, arose out of the
national characteristic of "consuming one's own smoke." He had been the
first to demonstrate with scientific precision that the suppression of
Catholicism in England, with its concomitant proscription of the
confessional box from the churches, had laid the foundation of three
quarters of the nation's nervous disabilities. He had thus called
attention to yet one more objectionable and stupid feature of the
Protestant Church, and one which was perhaps more nauseating, more
sordid, than any to which his friend Dr. Melhado was so fond of
pointing. Thus he called his sanatorium in Kent "The Confessional," and
his methods, there, followed pretty closely the methods of the mediaeval
Church.

He would point out that it was this absence of the rite of confession
that made people in Protestant countries so conspicuously more
self-conscious than the inhabitants of Catholic countries. For nothing
leads to self-consciousness more certainly than the attempt constantly
to consume one's own smoke.

"The independence, individualism, and natural secrecy of the English
character, together with the enormous amount of sex suppression that
English Puritanism involves," he used frequently to say, "leads to an
incredible amount of consumption of their own smoke by millions of the
English people. Large numbers of these people are able to digest the
fumes, others fall ill with nervous trouble owing to the poison
contained in the vapours they try to dispose of in secrecy."

His startling successes had all been based upon the recognition of this
fundamental fact. "But," as he said, "instead of these people keeping
well throu