“But there is no such thing,” said Father Payne, “except in combination with entire irrationality.  One can’t say at any time of one’s life, ’I know everything worth knowing.  I am in a position to form a final judgment.’  You can say, ’I will shut off all fresh light from my mind, and I will consider no further evidence,’ but that isn’t a thing to respect!  I begin to suspect, Rose, that why you praised the uncompromising Liberal, as you call him, is because he is the only kind of opponent who isn’t dangerous.  A man who takes up such a position as I have described is practically insane.  He has a fixed idea, which neither argument nor evidence can alter.  The uncompromising man of fixed opinions, whatever those opinions may be, is almost the only man I do not respect, because he is really the only inconsistent person.  He says, ’I have formed an opinion which is based on experience, and I shall not alter it.’  That is tantamount to saying that you have done with experience; it is a claim to have attained infallibility through fallible faculties.  Where is the dignity of that?  It’s just a deification of stupidity and stubbornness and insolence and complacency.”

“But you must take your stand on some certainties,” said Rose.

“The fewer the better,” said Father Payne.  “One may learn to discriminate between things, and to observe differences; but that is very different from saying that you have got at the ultimate essence of any one thing.  I am all for clearness—­we ought not to confuse things with each other, or use the same names for different things; but I’m all against claiming absolute and impeccable knowledge.  It may be a comfortable system for a man who doesn’t want to be bothered; but he is only deferring the bother—­he is like a man who stays in bed because he doesn’t like dressing.  But it isn’t a solution to stay in bed—­it is only suspending the solution.  No, we mustn’t have any regard for human consistency—­it’s a very paltry attribute; it’s the opposite of anthropomorphism.  That makes out God to be in the image of man, but consistency claims for man the privilege of God.  And that isn’t wholesome, you know, either for a man or his friends!”

“I give up,” said Rose:  “can nothing be logical?”

“Hardly anything,” said Father Payne, “except logic itself.  You have to coin logical ideas into counters to play with.  No two things, for instance, can ever be absolutely equal, except imaginary equalities—­and that’s the mischief of logic applied to life, that it presumes an exact valuation of the ideas it works with, when no two people’s valuations of the same idea are identical, and even one person’s valuation varies from time to time; and logic breeds a phantom sort of consistency which only exists in the imagination.  You know the story of how Smith and Jones were arguing, and Smith said, ‘Brown will agree with me’:  ‘Yes,’ said Jones triumphantly, ’he will, but for my reasons!’”