erative and
final. The scientist accepted the fact that Religion had a right
to speak in matters that lay beyond scientific data; the
theologian no longer denounced as fraudulent or disingenuous the
claims of the scientist to exercise powers that were at last
found to be natural. Neither needed to establish his own position
by attacking that of his partner, and the two accordingly,
without prejudice or passion, worked together to define yet
further that ever-narrowing range of ground between the two
worlds which up to the present remained unmapped. Suggestion, for
example, acting upon the mutual relations of body and mind, was
recognized by the theologian as a force sufficient to produce
phenomena which in earlier days he had claimed as evidently
supernatural. And, on the other side, the scientist no longer
made wild acts of faith in nature, in attributing to her
achievements which he could not for an instant parallel by any
deliberate experiment. In a word, the scientist repeated, "I
believe in God "; and the theologian, "I recognize Nature."

Monsignor sat apart in silence, while the others talked.

He had thought in Rome that he had reached interior conviction;
he understood now in Lourdes that his conviction had not gone so
deep as he had fancied. He had learned in Versailles that the
Church could reorganize society, in Rome that she could reconcile
nations; he had seen finally in Lourdes that she could
resolve philosophies.

And this very discovery made him the more timid. For he began to
wonder whether there were not yet further discoveries which he
would have to make--workings out and illustrations of the
principles he had begun to perceive. How, for example, he began
to ask himself, would the Church deal with those who did not
recognize her claims--those solitary individuals or groups here
and there who, he knew, still clung pathetically to the old
dreams of the beginning of the century--to the phantom of
independent thought and the intoxicating nightmare of democratic
government? It was certain now that these things were
dreams--that it was ludicrously absurd to imagine that a man
could profitably detach himself from Revelation and the stream of
tradition and development that flowed from it; that it was
ridiculous to turn creation upside-down and to attempt to govern
the educated few by the uneducated many. Yet people did
occasionally hold impossible and absurd theories. . . . How,
then, would these be t