“Why not?” said Father Payne, laughing.  “You may hate them so much that you may wish them to be different.  That is the sound way to begin.  I say to myself, ’Here is a truly dreadful person!  I would abolish and obliterate him if I could; but as I cannot, I must try to get him out of this mess, that we may live more at ease,’ It is simple humbug to pretend to like everyone.  You may not think it is entirely people’s fault that they are so unpleasant; but if you really love fine and beautiful things, you must hate mean and ugly things.  Don’t let there be any misunderstanding,” he said, smiling round the table.  “I have hated most of you at different times, some of you very much.  I don’t deny there are good points about you, but that isn’t enough.  Sometimes you are detestable!”

“I see what you mean,” said Barthrop; “but you don’t hate people—­you only hate things in them and about them.  It is just a selection.”

“Not at all,” said Father Payne.  “How are you going to separate people’s qualities and attributes from themselves?  It is a process of addition and subtraction, if you like.  There may be a balance in your favour.  But when a bad mood is on, when a person is bilious, fractious, ugly, cross, you hate him.  It is natural to do so, and it is right to do so.  I do loathe this talk of mild, weak, universal love.  The only chance of human beings getting on at all, or improving at all, is that they should detest what is detestable, as they abominate a bad smell.  The only reason why we are clean is because we have gradually learnt to hate bad smells.  A bad smell means something dangerous in the background—­so do ugliness, ill-health, bad temper, vanity, greediness, stupidity, meanness.  They are all danger signals.  We have no business to ignore them, or to forget them, or to make allowances for them.  They are all part of the beastliness of the world.”

“But if we believe in God, and in God’s goodness—­if He does not hate anything which He has made,” said Lestrange rather ruefully, “ought we not to try to do the same?”

“My dear Lestrange,” said Father Payne, “one would think you were teaching a Sunday-school class!  How do you know that God made the nasty things?  One must not think so ill of Him as that!  It is better to think of God as feeble and inefficient, than to make Him responsible for all the filth and ugliness of the world.  He hates them as much as you do, you may be sure of that—­and is as anxious as you are, and a great deal more anxious, to get rid of them.  God is infinitely more concerned about it, much more disappointed about it, than you or me.  Why, you and I are often taken in.  We don’t always know when things are rotten.  I have made friends before now with people who seemed charming, and I have found out that I was wrong.  But I do not think that God is taken in.  It is a very mixed affair, of course; but one thing is clear, that something very filthy is discharging itself into the world, like a sewer into a river, I am not going to credit God with that; He is trying to get rid of it, you may be sure, and He cannot do it as fast as He would like.  We have got to sympathise with Him, and we have got to help Him.  Come, someone else must talk—­I must get on with my dinner,” Father Payne addressed himself to his plate with obvious appetite.