“So it does.  How to get them to listen.  I tried to find out how Paul achieved that first step; and when I looked he told me plainly enough.  By becoming all things to all men; by showing these people that he understood them, and knew what was the matter with them.  Now do you go and do likewise by Vavasour, and then exercise your authority like a practical man.  If you have power to bind and loose, as you told us last Sunday, bind that fellow’s ungovernable temper, and loose him from the real slavery which he is in to his miserable conceit and self-indulgence! and then if he does not believe in your ’sacerdotal power,’ he is even a greater fool than I take him for.”

“Honestly, I will try:  God help me!” added Frank in a lower voice; “but as for quarrels between man and wife, as I told you, no one understands them less than I.”

“Then marry a wife yourself and quarrel a little with her for experiment, and then you’ll know all about it.”

Frank laughed in spite of himself.

“Thank you.  No man is less likely to try that experiment than I.”

“Hum!”

“I have quite enough as a bachelor to distract me from my work, without adding to them those of a wife and family, and those little home lessons in the frailty of human nature, in which you advise me to copy Mr. Vavasour.”

“And so,” said Tom, “having to doctor human beings, nineteen-twentieths of whom are married; and being aware that three parts of the miseries of human life come either from wanting to be married, or from married cares and troubles—­you think that you will improve your chance of doctoring your flock rightly by avoiding carefully the least practical acquaintance with the chief cause of their disease.  Philosophical and logical, truly!”

“You seem to have acquired a little knowledge of men and women, my good friend, without encumbering yourself with a wife and children.”

“Would you like to go to the same school to which I went?” asked Thurnall, with a look of such grave meaning that Frank’s pure spirit shuddered within him.  “And I’ll tell you this; whenever I see a woman nursing her baby, or a father with his child upon his knees, I say to myself—­they know more, at this minute, of human nature, as of the great law of ’C’est l’amour, l’amour, l’amour, which makes the world go round,’ than I am likely to do for many a day.  I’ll tell you what, sir!  These simple natural ties, which are common to us and the dumb animals,—­as I live, sir, they are the divinest things I see in the world!  I have but one, and that is love to my poor old father; that’s all the religion I have as yet:  but I tell you, it alone has kept me from being a ruffian and a blackguard.  And I’ll tell you more,” said Tom, warming, “of all diabolical dodges for preventing the parsons from seeing who they are, or what human beings are, or what their work in the world is, or anything else, the neatest is that celibacy of the clergy.  I should