who did no more than follow the swim—­who were sensitive to draughts, so to speak—­broke off from their old positions.  It is curious to read in the history of the time how they were hailed as independent thinkers.  It was just exactly what they were not....  Where was I?  Oh, yes....  Well, that cleared the ground for us, and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while—­extraordinary, that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were very different from twenty, or even ten, years before.  I mean that, roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun.  The religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a man, Materialists and Communists.  But we made progress because we had a few exceptional men—­Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the philanthropists, and so on.  It really seemed as if Delaney and his disciples might carry everything before them.  You remember his ‘Analogy’?  Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....

“Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number through the final definitions.  The ‘Exodus of the Intellectuals’ the world called it—–­”

“The Biblical decisions,” put in the younger priest.

“That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then understood.  He died outside the Church, you know.  Then there was the condemnation of Sciotti’s book on Comparative Religion....  After that the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones.  It seems extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement when the Necessary Trades Bill became law in ’60.  People thought that all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised; but, you know, it didn’t.  Certainly the nation was behind it.”

“What year was the Two-Thirds Majority Bill passed?” asked Percy.

“Oh! long before—­within a year or two of the fall of the House of Lords.  It was necessary, I think, or the Individualists would have gone raving mad....  Well, the Necessary Trades Bill was inevitable:  people had begun to see that even so far back as the time when the railways were municipalised.  For a while there was a burst of art; because all the Individualists who could went in for it (it was then that the Toller school was founded); but they soon drifted back into Government employment; after all, the six-per-cent limit for all individual enterprise was not much of a temptation; and Government paid well.”

Percy shook his head.

“Yes; but I cannot understand the present state of affairs.  You said just now that things went slowly?”