“Yes, but you must expect to change them,” said Father Payne.  “Principles are only deductions after all:  and to remain consistent as a rule only means that you have ceased to do anything with your experience, or else it means that you have taken your principles second-hand.  They ought to be living things, yielding fruits of increase.  I don’t mean that you should be at the mercy of a persuasive speaker, or of the last book you have read—­but, on the other hand, to meet an interesting man or to read a suggestive book ought to modify your views a little.  You ought to be elastic.  The only thing that is never quite the same is opinion; and to be holding a ten years’ old opinion simply means that you are stranded.  There’s nothing worse than to be high and dry.”

“But isn’t it worse still,” said Vincent, “to see so many sides to a question that you can’t take a definite part?”

“I don’t feel sure,” said Father Payne.  “I know that the all-round sympathiser is generally found fault with in books; but it is an uncommon temperament, and means a great power of imagination.  I am not sure that the faculty of taking a side is a very valuable one.  People say that things get done that way; but a great many things get done wrong, and have to be undone.  There is no blessing on the palpably one-sided people.  Besides, there is a great movement in the world now towards approximation.  Majorities don’t want to bully minorities.  Persecution has gone out.  People are beginning to see that principles are few and interpretations many.  I believe, as a matter of fact, that we ought always to be simplifying our principles, and getting them under a few big heads.  Besides, you do not convert people by hammering away at principles.  I always like the story of the Frenchman who said to his opponent, ’Come, let us go for a little walk, and see if we can disagree.’”

“I don’t exactly see what he meant,” said Vincent.

“Why, he meant,” said Father Payne, “that if they could bring their minds together, they would find that there wasn’t very much to quarrel about.  But I don’t believe in arguing.  I don’t think opinion changes in that way.  I fancy it has tides of its own, and that ideas appear in numbers of minds all over the world, like flowers in spring.

“But how is one ever to act at all,” said Vincent, “if one is always to be feeling that a principle may turn out to be nonsense after all?”

“Well, I think action is mainly a matter of instinct,” said Father Payne.  “But I don’t really believe in taking too diffuse a view of things in general.  Very few of us are strong enough and wise enough, let me say, to read the papers with any profit.  The newspapers emphasize the disunion of the world, and I believe in its solidarity.  Come, I’ll tell you how I think people ought really to live, if you like.  I think a man ought to live his own life, without attempting too much reference to what is going on in the world.  I