This was deplorable.  The only way out of it that Ernest could see was that he should get married at once.  But then he did not know any one whom he wanted to marry.  He did not know any woman, in fact, whom he would not rather die than marry.  It had been one of Theobald’s and Christina’s main objects to keep him out of the way of women, and they had so far succeeded that women had become to him mysterious, inscrutable objects to be tolerated when it was impossible to avoid them, but never to be sought out or encouraged.  As for any man loving, or even being at all fond of any woman, he supposed it was so, but he believed the greater number of those who professed such sentiments were liars.  Now, however, it was clear that he had hoped against hope too long, and that the only thing to do was to go and ask the first woman who would listen to him to come and be married to him as soon as possible.

He broached this to Pryer, and was surprised to find that this gentleman, though attentive to such members of his flock as were young and good-looking, was strongly in favour of the celibacy of the clergy, as indeed were the other demure young clerics to whom Pryer had introduced Ernest.

CHAPTER LII

“You know, my dear Pontifex,” said Pryer to him, some few weeks after Ernest had become acquainted with him, when the two were taking a constitutional one day in Kensington Gardens, “You know, my dear Pontifex, it is all very well to quarrel with Rome, but Rome has reduced the treatment of the human soul to a science, while our own Church, though so much purer in many respects, has no organised system either of diagnosis or pathology—­I mean, of course, spiritual diagnosis and spiritual pathology.  Our Church does not prescribe remedies upon any settled system, and, what is still worse, even when her physicians have according to their lights ascertained the disease and pointed out the remedy, she has no discipline which will ensure its being actually applied.  If our patients do not choose to do as we tell them, we cannot make them.  Perhaps really under all the circumstances this is as well, for we are spiritually mere horse doctors as compared with the Roman priesthood, nor can we hope to make much headway against the sin and misery that surround us, till we return in some respects to the practice of our forefathers and of the greater part of Christendom.”

Ernest asked in what respects it was that his friend desired a return to the practice of our forefathers.

“Why, my dear fellow, can you really be ignorant?  It is just this, either the priest is indeed a spiritual guide, as being able to show people how they ought to live better than they can find out for themselves, or he is nothing at all—­he has no raison d’etre.  If the priest is not as much a healer and director of men’s souls as a physician is of their bodies, what is he?  The history of