forbidden manner. You can understand why it is so
rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres,
higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are
amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints,
and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius,
who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the
whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint.'

'There is something profoundly unnatural about sin? Is that what you
mean?'

'Exactly. Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but
holiness works on lines that _were_ natural once; it is an effort to
recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to
gain the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels, and in
making this effort man becomes a demon. I told you that the mere
murderer is not _therefore_ a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is
sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that
while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he now is--to man
the social, civilized being--evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense
than good. The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the
sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he
repeats the Fall.'

'But are you a Catholic?' said Cotgrave.

'Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.'

'Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you
would set down as a mere trivial dereliction?'

'Yes; but in one place the word "sorcerers" comes in the same sentence,
doesn't it? That seems to me to give the key-note. Consider: can you
imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent
man's life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is
excluded by those words; it is, above all, the "sorcerers" who use the
material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as
instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you
this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with
materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness
if we encountered it.'

'But shouldn't we experience a certain horror--a terror such as you
hinted we would experience if a rose tree sang--in the mere presence of
an evil man?'

'We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you
speak of, even ani