Theron had started walking again.  “But the moral degradation of it!” he snapped out at her over his shoulder.  “I’d rather earn the meanest living, at an honest trade, and be free from it.”

“That may all be,” responded Sister Soulsby.  “But it isn’t a question of what you’d rather do.  It’s what you can do.  How could you earn a living?  What trade or business do you suppose you could take up now, and get a living out of?  Not one, my man, not one.”

Theron stopped and stared at her.  This view of his capabilities came upon him with the force and effect of a blow.

“I don’t discover, myself,” he began stumblingly, “that I’m so conspicuously inferior to the men I see about me who do make livings, and very good ones, too.”

“Of course you’re not,” she replied with easy promptness; “you’re greatly the other way, or I shouldn’t be taking this trouble with you.  But you’re what you are because you’re where you are.  The moment you try on being somewhere else, you’re done for.  In all this world nobody else comes to such unmerciful and universal grief as the unfrocked priest.”

The phrase sent Theron’s fancy roving.  “I know a Catholic priest,” he said irrelevantly, “who doesn’t believe an atom in—­in things.”

“Very likely,” said Sister Soulsby.  “Most of us do.  But you don’t hear him talking about going and earning his living, I’ll bet!  Or if he does, he takes powerful good care not to go, all the same.  They’ve got horse-sense, those priests.  They’re artists, too.  They know how to allow for the machinery behind the scenes.”

“But it’s all so different,” urged the young minister; “the same things are not expected of them.  Now I sat the other night and watched those people you got up around the altar-rail, groaning and shouting and crying, and the others jumping up and down with excitement, and Sister Lovejoy—­did you see her?—­coming out of her pew and regularly waltzing in the aisle, with her eyes shut, like a whirling dervish—­I positively believe it was all that made me ill.  I couldn’t stand it.  I can’t stand it now.  I won’t go back to it!  Nothing shall make me!”

“Oh-h, yes, you will,” she rejoined soothingly.  “There’s nothing else to do.  Just put a good face on it, and make up your mind to get through by treading on as few corns as possible, and keeping your own toes well in, and you’ll be surprised how easy it’ll all come to be.  You were speaking of the revival business.  Now that exemplifies just what I was saying—­it’s a part of our machinery.  Now a church is like everything else,—­it’s got to have a boss, a head, an authority of some sort, that people will listen to and mind.  The Catholics are different, as you say.  Their church is chuck-full of authority—­all the way from the Pope down to the priest—­and accordingly they do as they’re told.  But the Protestants—­your Methodists most of all—­they say ’No, we won’t have any authority, we won’t obey any boss.’