“To throw up the priesthood,” the doctor interposed upon his hesitation.  “Yes, I know the tribe.  Why, my dear sir, your entire profession would have perished from the memory of mankind, if it hadn’t been for women.  It is a very curious subject.  Lots of thinkers have dipped into it, but no one has gone resolutely in with a search-light and exploited the whole thing.  Our boys, for instance, traverse in their younger years all the stages of the childhood of the race.  They have terrifying dreams of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows and arrows—­all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones, marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and heaven only knows how much earlier.  But the boy goes through all this, and leaves it behind him—­so completely that the grown man feels himself more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he would among Kurds or Esquimaux.  But the woman is totally different.  She is infinitely more precocious as a girl.  At an age when her slow brother is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which is peculiarly her own.  Having got there, she stays there; she dies there.  The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare.  He goes on, if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she belongs.  If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and hangs around in her vicinity.”

Theron smiled.  “We priests,” he said, and paused again to enjoy the words—­“I suppose I oughtn’t to inquire too closely just where we belong in the procession.”

“We are considering the question impersonally,” said the doctor.  “First of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract women.  They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their bones, as they were ten thousand years ago.  Even the cleverest of them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries.  Think of the broadest women you know.  One of them will throw salt over her shoulder if she spills it.  Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the bubbles in a spoon.  Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of tea-grounds.  They make the constituency to which an institution based on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally appeal.  Secondly, there is the personality of the priest.”

“Yes,” assented Ware.  There rose up before him, on the instant, the graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.