The Bishop shrugged his shoulders.  “As long,” said he, “as the people need the restraint of a dogmatic religion so long must we do our utmost to maintain its outward forms.  In our market-place on feast-days there appears the strange figure of a man who carries a banner painted with an image of Saint Paul surrounded by a mass of writhing serpents.  This man calls himself a descendant of the apostle and sells to our peasants the miraculous powder with which he killed the great serpent at Malta.  If it were not for the banner, the legend, the descent from Saint Paul, how much efficacy do you think those powders would have?  And how long do you think the precepts of an invisible divinity would restrain the evil passions of an ignorant peasant?  It is because he is afraid of the plaster God in his parish church, and of the priest who represents that God, that he still pays his tithes and forfeitures and keeps his hands from our throats.  By Diana,” cried the Bishop, taking snuff, “I have no patience with those of my calling who go about whining for apostolic simplicity, and would rob the churches of their ornaments and the faithful of their ceremonies.

“For my part,” he added, glancing with a smile about the delicately-stuccoed walls of the pavilion, through the windows of which climbing roses shed their petals on the rich mosaics transferred from a Roman bath, “for my part, when I remember that ’tis to Jesus of Nazareth I owe the good roof over my head and the good nags in my stable; nay, the very venison and pheasants from my preserves, with the gold plate I eat them off, and above all the leisure to enjoy as they deserve these excellent gifts of the Creator—­when I consider this, I say, I stand amazed at those who would rob so beneficent a deity of the least of his privileges.—­But why,” he continued again after a moment, as Odo remained silent, “should we vex ourselves with such questions, when Providence has given us so fair a world to enjoy and such varied faculties with which to apprehend its beauties?  I think you have not seen the Venus Callipyge in bronze that I have lately received from Rome?” And he rose and led the way to the house.

This conversation revealed to Odo a third conception of the religious idea.  In Piedmont religion imposed itself as a military discipline, the enforced duty of the Christian citizen to the heavenly state; to the Duke it was a means of purchasing spiritual immunity from the consequences of bodily weakness; to the Bishop, it replaced the panem et circenses of ancient Rome.  Where, in all this, was the share of those whom Christ had come to save?  Where was Saint Francis’s devotion to his heavenly bride, the Lady Poverty?  Though here and there a good parish priest like Crescenti ministered to the temporal wants of the peasantry, it was only the free-thinker and the atheist who, at the risk of life and fortune, laboured for their moral liberation.  Odo listened with a saddened heart,