“Alas!  He is back in Paris by now.  But give me your letters!  I’ll see that they are presented properly; and you shall receive a royal command for the disputation in plenty of time.”

They handed over their letters; they exchanged compliments once more; they were escorted as far as the door of the room by the prelate, across the next ante-chamber by an imposing man in black velvet with a chain, across the third by a cuirassier, and across the hall to the bottom of the steps by two tremendous footmen in the ancient royal livery.

Monsignor was silent for a few yards.

“Aren’t you afraid of an anti-clerical reaction?” he asked suddenly.

“How do you mean?  I don’t understand.”

Then Monsignor launched out.  He had accepted by now the theory that he had had a lapse of memory, and that so far as his intellect was concerned, he was practically a man of a century ago, owing to the history he had happened to be reading shortly before his collapse; and he talked therefore from that standpoint.

He produced, that is to say, with astonishing fluency all those arguments that were common in the mouths of the more serious anti-clericals of the beginning of the century—­the increase of Religious Orders, the domineering tendency of all ecclesiastics in the enjoyment of temporal power, the impossibility of combating supernatural arguments, the hostility of the Church to education—­down even to the celibacy of the clergy.  He paused for breath as they turned out of the great gateway.

Father Jervis laughed aloud and patted him on the arm.

“My dear Monsignor, I can’t compete with you.  You’re too eloquent.  Of course, I remember from reading history that those things used to be said, and I suppose Socialists say them now.  But, you know, no educated man ever dreams of such arguments; nor indeed do the uneducated!  It’s the half-educated, as usual, who’s the enemy.  He always is.  The Wise Men and the shepherds both knelt in Bethlehem.  It was the bourgeois who stood apart.”

“That’s no answer,” persisted the other.

“Well, let’s see,” said the priest good-humouredly.  “We’ll begin with celibacy.  Now it’s perfectly true that it’s thought almost a disgrace for a man not to have a large family.  The average is certainly not less than ten in civilized nations.  But for all that a priest is looked upon without any contempt at all.  Why?  Because he’s a spiritual father; because he begets spiritual children to God, and feeds and nourishes them.  Of course to an atheist this is nonsense; and even to an agnostic it’s a very doubtful benefit.  But, my dear Monsignor, you must remember that these hardly exist amongst us.  The entire civilized world of to-day is as absolutely convinced of Heaven and Grace and the Church, and the havoc that Sin makes not only as regards the next world but in this—­so absolutely convinced that he understands perfectly that a priest is far more productive of general good than a physical father possibly can be.  It’s the priest who keeps the whole thing going.  Don’t you see?  And then, in a Catholic world, the instinct that the man who serves the altar should be without physical ties—­well, that’s simply natural.”