y be some part of God I am not meant to know. But I had a
work to do, and it is making the work difficult."

"And I suppose," said the atheist, quite gently, "that you and I know
all about which part of God we ought to know."

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining everything.

"The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried. "If the
Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club would dissolve
and cease to exist. But when we belong to the Church we belong to
something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you
talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but
it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church
would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I
am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you
ask me to trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned
upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the jaundice. You
ask me to trust that when it softens towards you and not to trust the
thing which I believe to be outside myself and more real than the blood
in my body."

"Stop a moment," said Turnbull, in the same easy tone, "Even in the very
act of saying that you believe this or that, you imply that there is a
part of yourself that you trust even if there are many parts which you
mistrust. If it is only you that like me, surely, also, it is only you
that believe in the Catholic Church."

Evan remained in an unmoved and grave attitude. "There is a part of me
which is divine," he answered, "a part that can be trusted, but there
are also affections which are entirely animal and idle."

"And you are quite certain, I suppose," continued Turnbull, "that if
even you esteem me the esteem would be wholly animal and idle?" For the
first time MacIan started as if he had not expected the thing that was
said to him. At last he said:

"Whatever in earth or heaven it is that has joined us two together, it
seems to be something which makes it impossible to lie. No, I do not
think that the movement in me towards you was...was that surface sort of
thing. It may have been something deeper...something strange. I cannot
understand the thing at all. But understand this and understand it
thoroughly, if I loved you my love might be divine. No, it is not some
trifle that we are fighting about. It is not some superstition or some
symbol. When you wrote those words abou