Also they decided that it would not be without interest to know what belief is held by the man of common education and intelligence—­the man who behaves correctly but will not go to church.

Here Father Riley sweetly reminded them—­“No questions are asked in the Mother Church, gentlemen, that may not be answered with authority.  In your churches, without an authority superior to mere reason, destructive questions will be asked more and more frequently.”

Gravely they agreed that the church was losing its hold on the people.  That but for its social and charitable activities, its state would be alarming.

“Your churches!” Father Riley corrected with suave persistence.  “No church can endure without an infallible head.”

Again and again during the meal Bernal had been tempted to speak.  But each time he had been restrained by a sense of his aloofness.  These men, too, were wheels within the machine, each revolving as he must.  They would simply pity him, or be amused.

More and more acutely was he coming to feel the futility, the crass, absurd presumption of what he had come back to undertake.  From the lucid quiet of his mountain haunts he had descended into a vale where antiquated cymbals clashed in wild discordance above the confusing clatter of an intricate machinery—­machinery too complicated to be readjusted by a passing dreamer.  In his years of solitude he had grown to believe that the teachers of the world were no longer dominated by that ancient superstition of a superhumanly malignant God.  He had been prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his absence, been purified by many eliminations into a God who, as he had once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the soul of a pope.  Yet here was a high type of the priest of the Mother Church, gentle, Godly, learned, who gravely and as one having authority told how God would blight forever the soul of a child unbaptised, thus imputing to Deity a regard for mechanical rites that would constitute even a poor human father an incredible monster.

Yet the marvel of it seemed to him to lie in this:  that the priest himself lived actually a life of loving devotion and sacrifice in marked opposition to this doctrine of formal cruelty; that his church, more successfully than any other in Christendom, had met the needs of humanity, coming closer to men in their sin and sickness, ministering to them with a deeper knowledge, a more affectionate intimacy, than any other.  That all these men of God should hold formally to dogmas belying the humaneness of their actual practise—­here was the puzzling anomaly that might well give pause to any casual message-bringer.  Struggle as he might, it was like a tangling mesh cast over him—­this growing sense of his own futility.