“Pray, never mind me at all, gentlemen—­I’ll listen blandly whilst I disarticulate this beautiful bird.”

“I say one is quite as extreme as the other,” again declared the discoverer of this fact, feeling that his perspicacity had not been sufficiently remarked.

“I dare say Whittaker is meditating a bitter cynicism,” suggested Father Riley.

“Concerning that incandescent but unfortunate young man,” remarked the amiable Presbyterian—­“I trust God’s Providence to care for children and fools—­”

“And yet I found his remarks suggestive,” said the twinkling-eyed Methodist.  “That is, we asked for the belief of the average non-church-goer—­and I dare say he gave it to us.  It occurs to me further that he has merely had the wit to put in blunt, brutal words what so many of us declare with academic flourishes.  We can all name a dozen treatises written by theologians ostensibly orthodox which actually justify his utterances.  It seems to me, then, that we may profit by his blasphemies.”

“How?” demanded Whittaker, with some bluntness.

“Ah—­that is what the Church must determine.  We already know how to reach the heathen, the unbookish, the unthinking—­but how reach the educated—­the science-bitten?  It is useless to deny that the brightest, biggest minds are outside the Church—­indifferentists or downright opponents of it.  I am not willing to believe that God meant men like these to perish—­I don’t like to think of Emerson being lost, or Huxley, or Spencer, or even Darwin—­Question:  has the Church power to save the educated?”

“Sure, I know one that has never lacked it,” purled Father Riley.

“There’s an answer to you in Linford’s letter,” added Whittaker.

“Gentlemen, you jest with me—­but I shall continue to feel grateful to our slightly dogmatic young friend for his artless brutalities.  Now I know what the business man keeps to himself when I ask him why he has lost interest in the church.”

“There’s a large class we can’t take from you,” said Father Riley—­“that class with whom religion is a mode of respectability.”

“And you can’t take our higher critics, either—­more’s the pity!”

“On my word, now, gentlemen,” returned the Catholic, again, “that was a dear, blasphemous young whelp!  You know, I rather liked him.  Bless the soul of you, I could as little have rebuked the lad as I could punish the guiltless indecence of a babe—­he was that shockingly naif!”

“He is undoubtedly the just fruit of our own toleration,” repeated the high-church rector.

“And he stands for our knottiest problem,” said the Presbyterian.

“A problem all the knottier, I suspect,” began Whittaker—­

“Didn’t I tell you?” interrupted Father Riley.  “Oh, the outrageous cynic!  Be braced for him, now!”

“I was only going to suggest,” resumed the wicked Unitarian, calmly, “that those people, Linford and his brother—­and even that singularly effective Mrs. Linford, with her inferable views about divorce—­you know I dare say that they—­really you know—­that they possess the courage of—­”