The only thing he was sure of was that he had changed a great deal, and, he thought, for the better.  He seemed to himself a much more real person than he was a year ago, being now in full possession of his soul, and surely the possession of one’s soul is a great reality.  By the soul he meant a special way of feeling and seeing.  But the soul is more than that—­it is a light; and this inner light, faint at first, had not been blown out.  If he had blown it out, as many priests had done, he would not have experienced any qualms of conscience.  The other priests in the diocese experienced none when they drove erring women out of their parishes, and the reason of this was that they followed a light from without, deliberately shutting out the light of the soul.

The question interested him, and he pondered it a long while, finding himself at last forced to conclude that there is no moral law except one’s own conscience, and that the moral obligation of every man is to separate the personal conscience from the impersonal conscience.  By the impersonal conscience he meant the opinions of others, traditional beliefs, and the rest; and thinking of these things he wandered round the Druid stones, and when his thoughts returned to Nora’s special case he seemed to understand that if any other priest had acted as he had acted he would have acted rightly, for in driving a sinful woman out of the parish he would be giving expression to the moral law as he understood it and as Garranard understood it.  This primitive code of morals was all Garranard could understand in its present civilization, and any code is better than no code.  Of course, if the priest were a transgressor himself he could not administer the law.  Happily, that was a circumstance that did not arise often.  So it was said; but what did he know of the souls of the priests with whom he dined, smoked pipes, and played cards?  And he stopped, surprised, for it had never occurred to him that all a man knows of his fellow is whether he be clean or dirty, short or tall, thin or stout.  ‘Even the soul of Moran is obscure to me,’ he said—­’obscure as this wood;’ and at that moment the mystery of the wood seemed to deepen, and he stood for a long while looking through the twilight of the hazels.

Very likely many of the priests he knew had been tempted by women:  some had resisted temptation, and some had sinned and repented.  There might be a priest who had sinned and lived for years in sin; even so if he didn’t leave his parish, if he didn’t become an apostate priest, faith would return to him in the end.  But the apostate priest is anathema in the eyes of the Church; the doctrine always has been that a sin matters little if the sinner repent.  Father Oliver suddenly saw himself years hence, still in Garranard, administering the Sacraments, and faith returning like an incoming tide, covering the weedy shore, lapping round the high rock of doubt.  If he desired faith, all he had to do was to go on saying Mass, hearing confessions, baptizing the young, burying the old, and in twenty years—­maybe it would take thirty—­when his hair was white and his skin shrivelled, he would be again a good priest, beloved by his parishioners, and carried in the fulness of time by them to the green churchyard where Father Peter lay near the green pines.