phantly on the knee, and brought
out his ace:

"The Christ-idea is the consecration of the instinct to have a
visible, tangible hero for a god."

Again he slapped me on the knee, and said:

"The Mass is the consecration of the instinct to have a place and a
time and an Objective Presence, where one can touch the hem of His
garment and worship."

That was his king. He emphasised his final argument on my knee more
triumphantly than ever.

"And confession is the consecration of the instinct to unburden your
soul; to know that you are not alone in your knowledge of yourself;
to know that at a given moment, by a definite sacrament, your sins
are blotted away, as though they had never been."

His victorious contention, by its very impulse, carried its colours
into my heart. I yielded to his conviction that Catholic
Christianity held all the honours. But I fancy I had wanted to
capitulate, before ever the attack began.

"By Jove," I said. "I never saw things like that before."

"Of course you didn't," he snapped.

Having broken through my front, he was re-marshalling his arguments
into a new formation, ready to bear down upon Doe, when that
spirited youth, who alone did any counter-attacking, assumed the
initiative, and assaulted Monty with the words:

"It's no good. If I made my confession to a priest who'd been my
friend, I'd never want to see him again for shame. I'd run round the
corner, if he appeared in the street."

"On the contrary," said Monty, "you'd run to meet him. You'd know
that you were dearer to him than you could possibly have been, if
you had never gone to him in confession. You'd know that your
relations after the sacred moment of confession were more intimate
than ever before."

I saw Doe's defence crumbling beneath this attack. I knew he would
instantly want these intimate relations to exist between Monty and
himself. Monty, subtly enough, had borne down on that part of Doe's
make-up which was most certain to give way--his yielding
affectionateness.

And, while Doe remained silent and thoughtful, Monty attacked with a
new weight of argument at a fresh point--Doe's love of the heroic.

"Don't you think," he asked, "that, if you've gone the whole way
with your sins, it's up to a sportsman to go the whole way with his
confession. And anybody knows that it's much more difficult to
confess to God through a priest than in the privacy of one's own
room. It's difficult, but it's the grand thing