monstrous, and indeed almost incredible, that men who really had some claim to be called educated seriously maintained that the most stable and the most reasonable method of government lay in the extension of the franchise—­that is, in reversing the whole eternal and logical order of things, and permitting the inexpert to rule the expert, and the uneducated and the ill-informed to control by their votes—­that is, by sheer weight of numbers—­the educated and the well-informed.  Yet such was the case.  And the result was—­since all these matters act and react—­that the idea of authority from above in matters of religion was thought to be as ‘undemocratic’ as in matters of government and social life.  Men had learnt, that is to say, something of the very real truth in the theory of the Least Common Multiple, and, as in psychology and many other sciences, had presumed that the little fragment of truth that they had perceived was the whole truth.”

Mr. Manners paused to draw breath.  Obviously he was enjoying himself enormously.  He was a born lecturer, and somehow the rather pompous sentences were strangely alive and strangely interesting.  Above all, they fascinated and amazed the prelate at the head of the table, for they revealed to him an advance of thought, and an assurance in the position they described, that seemed wholly inexplicable.  Such phrases as “all educated men,” “the well-informed,” and the rest—­these were vaguely familiar to him, yet surely in a very different connection.  He had at the back of his mind a kind of idea that these were the phrases that the irreligious or the agnostics applied to themselves; yet here was a man, obviously a student, and a statesman as he knew, calmly assuming (scarcely even giving himself the trouble to state) that all educated and well-informed persons were Catholic Christians!

He settled himself down to listen with renewed interest as Mr. Manners began once more.

“Well,” he said, “to come more directly to our point; let us next consider what were those steps and processes by which Catholic truth once more became the religion of the civilized world, as it had been five centuries earlier.

“And first we must remark that, even at the very beginning of this century, popular thought—­in England as elsewhere—­had retraced its steps so far as to acknowledge that if Christianity were true—­true, really and actually—­the Catholic Church was the only possible embodiment of it.  Not only did the shrewdest agnostic minds of the time acknowledge this—­such men as Huxley in the previous century, Sir Leslie Stephen, Mallock, and scores of others—­but even popular Christianity itself began to turn in that direction.  Of course there were survivals and reactions, as we should expect.  There was a small body of Christians in England called Anglicans, who attempted to hold another view; there was that short-lived movement called Modernism, that held yet a third position.  But, for the rest, it was as I say.