animals afterwards.  Religious defences must yield before the pressure of the more original instinct, unless, indeed, hers was a merely sexual conscience.  The lowest forms of Anglicanism are reduced to perceiving conscience nowhere except in sex.  The Catholic was more concerned with matters of faith.  Not in France, Italy or Spain did Catholicism enter so largely into the private life of the individual as it did in England.  The foreign, or to be more exact, the native Catholic had worn the yoke till it fitted loose on his shoulders.  His was a more eclectic Christianity; he took what suited him and left the rest.  But in England Romanism had never shaken itself free from the Anglican conscience.  The convert never acquired the humanities of Rome, and in addition the lover had to contend against the confessional.  But in Evelyn’s case he could set against the confessional the delirium of success, the joy of art, the passion of emulation, jealousy and ambition, and last, but far from least, the ache of her own passionate body.  Remembering the fear and humility with which he had been used to approach the priest, and the terror of eternal fire in which he had waited for him to pronounce absolution, Owen paused to think how far such belief was from him now.  Yet he had once believed—­in a way.  He wondered at the survival of such a belief in the nineteenth century, and asked himself if confession were not inveterate in man.  The artist in his studio, the writer in his study, strive to tell their soul’s secret; the peasant throws himself at the feet of the priest, for, like them, he would unburden himself of that terrible weight of inwardness which is man.  Is not the most mendacious mistress often taken with the desire of confession ... the wish to reveal herself?  Upon this bed rock of human nature the confessional has been built.  And Owen admired the humanity of Rome.  Rome was terribly human.  No Church, he reflected, was so human.  Her doctrine may seem at times quaint, medieval, even gross, but when tested by the only test that can be applied, power to reach to human needs, and administer consolation to the greatest number, the most obtuse-minded cannot fail to see that Rome easily distances her rivals.  Her dogma and ceremonial are alike conceived in extraordinary sympathy with man’s common nature....

Our lives are enveloped in mystery, the scientist concedes that, and the woof of which the stuff of life is woven is shot through with many a thread of unknown origin, untraceable to any earthly shuttle.  There is a mystery, and in the elucidation of that mystery man never tires; the Sovereign Pontiff and the humblest crystal gazer are engaged in the same adventure.  The mystery is so intense, and lives so intimately in all, that Rome dared to come forward with a complete explanation.  And her necessarily perfunctory explanation she drapes in a ritual so magnificent, that even the philosopher ceases to question, and pauses abashed by the grandeur of the symbolism.  High Mass in its own home, under the arches of a Gothic cathedral, appealed alike to the loftiest and humblest intelligence.  Owen paused to think if there was not something vulgar in the parade of the Mass.  A simple prayer breathed by a burdened heart in secret awaked a more immediate and intimate response in him.  That was Anglicanism.  Perhaps he preferred Anglicanism.  The truth was, he was deficient in the religious instinct.