stants cannot; for their idea of heaven and ours is the
same--with this exception, that theirs will contain but a thin band
of saved ones, while ours will fill and grow to all eternity. . . .
I tell you, Lancelot, it is just the very doctrines for which
England most curses Rome, and this very purgatory at the head of
them, which constitute her strength and her allurement; which appeal
to the reason, the conscience, the heart of men, like me, who have
revolted from the novel superstition which looks pitilessly on at
the fond memories of the brother, the prayers of the orphan, the
doubled desolation of the widow, with its cold terrible assurance,
"There is no hope for thy loved and lost ones--no hope, but hell for
evermore!"

'I do not expect to convert you. You have your metempsychosis, and
your theories of progressive incarnation, and your monads, and your
spirits of the stars and flowers. I have not forgotten a certain
talk of ours over Falk Von Muller's Recollections of Goethe, and how
you materialists are often the most fantastic of theorists. . . . I
do not expect, I say, to convert you. I only want to show you there
is no use trying to show the self-satisfied Pharisees of the popular
sect--why, in spite of all their curses, men still go back to Rome.'

Lancelot read this, and re-read it; and smiled, but sadly--and the
more he read, the stronger its arguments seemed to him, and he
rejoiced thereat. For there is a bad pleasure--happy he who has not
felt it--in a pitiless reductio ad absurdum, which asks tauntingly,
'Why do you not follow out your own conclusions?'--instead of
thanking God that people do not follow them out, and that their
hearts are sounder than their heads. Was it with this feeling that
the fancy took possession of him, to show the letter to Tregarva? I
hope not--perhaps he did not altogether wish to lead him into
temptation, any more than I wish to lead my readers, but only to
make him, just as I wish to make them, face manfully a real awful
question now racking the hearts of hundreds, and see how they will
be able to answer the sophist fiend--for honestly, such he is--when
their time comes, as come it will. At least he wanted to test at
once Tregarva's knowledge and his logic. As for his 'faith,' alas!
he had not so much reverence for it as to care what effect Luke's
arguments might have there. 'The whole man,' quoth Lancelot to
himself, 'is a novel