to that, or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call ‘porther,’ you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst.  These young men down there are changing all that.  They have discovered lager.  Already many of them can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage.  The lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will be a new type of humanity—­the Kelt at his best.  He will dominate America.  He will be the American.  And his church—­with the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown—­will be the Church of America.”

“Let us have some more lager at once,” put in Celia.  “This revolution can’t be hurried forward too rapidly.”

Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest’s discourse was in jest, how much in earnest.  “It seems to me,” he said, “that as things are going, it doesn’t look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself about any kind of a church.  The march of science must very soon produce a universal scepticism.  It is in the nature of human progress.  What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must surely come to see in time.”

Father Forbes laughed outright this time.  “My dear Mr. Ware,” he said, as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, “of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses.  The savage’s natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively with him and his affairs.  That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the foundation of human nature.  That foundation is just as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age.  It will always remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious superstructure.  ‘Intelligent men,’ as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they all pull one way.  The people as a whole soon get tired of them.  They give too much trouble.  The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia.  The middle-aged man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do.  Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples’ superstitions alone.  That is always the ultimate view of the crowd.”

“But I don’t see,” observed Theron, “granting that all this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come out on top.  I could understand it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible.  There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise.”