st?"

"Yes," I said, "often. The churches are ugly, decidedly ugly, though
comfortable."

Mrs. Ascher shuddered.

"Comfortable!" she said. "Yes. Comfortable! Think of it. Churches,
comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a
set-off to it."

Mrs. Ascher panted. I could see the front of her dress--she wore a very
floppy scarlet teagown--rising and falling rapidly in the intensity of
her passion. I understood more or less what she felt. If God is at all
what we think He is, sublime, then there is something a little grotesque
about requiring a cushioned pew, a good system of heating and a nice fat
footstool as aids to communion with Him. Yet I am not convinced that
man is incapable of the highest emotion when his body is at ease. Some
degree of physical comfort seems to be required if the excursions of
the soul are to be successful. I cannot, for instance, enjoy the finest
kinds of poetry when I am very thirsty; nor have I ever met any one
who found real pleasure in a statue when he had toothache. There
is something to be said for the theory of the sceptical bishop in
Browning's poem, that the soul is only free to muse of lofty things

"When body gets its sop and holds its noise."

"The whole Irish question," said Mrs. Ascher, and she spoke with
the most tremendous vehemence, "is a struggle not between political
parties--what are political parties?"

"Rotten things," I said. "I quite agree with you there."

"Not between conceptions of religion---- What is religion but the
blind gropings of the human soul after some divine perfection vaguely
guessed?"

That is not what religion is in Ireland. There is nothing either dim
or vague about it there, and nobody gropes. Every one, from the infant
school child to the greatest of our six archbishops, is perfectly clear
and definite in his religious beliefs and suffers no doubts of any kind.
That is why Ireland is recognised everywhere as an island of saints. But
of course Mrs. Ascher could not be expected to know that.

"It is a struggle," she said, getting back to the Irish question as the
subject of her sentence, "between a people to whom art is an ideal and
a people who have accepted materialism and money for their gods, an
atheist people."

It has been the great misfortune of my life that I have never been able
to escape from the Irish question. It was discussed round my cradle by a
nurse whom my parents selected for her sound Prote