“Alas!  Lord,” sighed the humble Probus.  “Be persuaded by my humble experience; as long as you reduce your sacraments to formulas your justice will meet with terrible obstacles.”

“I know that better than you do,” replied the Lord.  “I see in a single glance both the actual problems which are difficult, and the future problems which will not be less difficult.  Thus I can foretell that when the sun will have turned round the earth two hundred and forty times more.

“Sublime language,” exclaimed the angels.

“And worthy of the creator of the world,” answered the pontiffs.

“It is,” resumed the Lord, “a manner of speaking in accordance with my old cosmogony and one which I cannot give up without losing my immutability. . . .

“After the sun, then, will have turned another two hundred and forty times round the earth, there will not be a single cleric left in Rome who knows Latin.  When they sing their litanies in the churches people will invoke Orichel, Roguel, and Totichel, and, as you know, these are devils and not angels.  Many robbers desiring to make their communions, but fearing that before obtaining pardon they would be forced to give up the things they had robbed to the Church, will make their confessions to travelling priests, who, ignorant of both Italian and Latin, and only speaking the patois of their village, will go through cities and towns selling the remission of sins for a base price, often for a bottle of wine.  Probably we shall not be inconvenienced by those absolutions as they will want contrition to make them valid, but it may be that their baptisms will cause us some embarrassment.  The priests will become so ignorant that they will baptize children in nomine patria et filia et spirita sancta, as Louis de Potter will take a pleasure in relating in the third volume of his ’Philosophical, Political, and Critical History of Christianity.’  It will be an arduous question to decide on the validity of such baptisms; for even if in my sacred writings I tolerate a Greek less elegant than Plato’s and a scarcely Ciceronian Latin, I cannot possibly admit a piece of pure patois as a liturgical formula.  And one shudders when one thinks that millions of new-born babes will be baptized by this method.  But let us return to our penguins.”

“Your divine words, Lord, have already led us back to them,” said St. Gal.  “In the signs of religion and the laws of salvation form necessarily prevails over essence, and the validity of a sacrament solely depends upon its form.  The whole question is whether the penguins have been baptized with the proper forms.  Now there is no doubt about the answer.”

The fathers and the doctors agreed, and their perplexity became only the more cruel.

“The Christian state,” said St. Cornelius, “is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin.  In it the birds are obliged to work out their own salvation.  How can they succeed?  The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church, and the penguins have no reason for changing theirs.  I mean that they are not intelligent enough to give up their present habits and assume better.”