all ages has shown—­and surely you must know this as well as I do—­that as men cannot cure the bodies of their patients if they have not been properly trained in hospitals under skilled teachers, so neither can souls be cured of their more hidden ailments without the help of men who are skilled in soul-craft—­or in other words, of priests.  What do one half of our formularies and rubrics mean if not this?  How in the name of all that is reasonable can we find out the exact nature of a spiritual malady, unless we have had experience of other similar cases?  How can we get this without express training?  At present we have to begin all experiments for ourselves, without profiting by the organised experience of our predecessors, inasmuch as that experience is never organised and co-ordinated at all.  At the outset, therefore, each one of us must ruin many souls which could be saved by knowledge of a few elementary principles.”

Ernest was very much impressed.

“As for men curing themselves,” continued Pryer, “they can no more cure their own souls than they can cure their own bodies, or manage their own law affairs.  In these two last cases they see the folly of meddling with their own cases clearly enough, and go to a professional adviser as a matter of course; surely a man’s soul is at once a more difficult and intricate matter to treat, and at the same time it is more important to him that it should be treated rightly than that either his body or his money should be so.  What are we to think of the practice of a Church which encourages people to rely on unprofessional advice in matters affecting their eternal welfare, when they would not think of jeopardising their worldly affairs by such insane conduct?”

Ernest could see no weak place in this.  These ideas had crossed his own mind vaguely before now, but he had never laid hold of them or set them in an orderly manner before himself.  Nor was he quick at detecting false analogies and the misuse of metaphors; in fact he was a mere child in the hands of his fellow curate.

“And what,” resumed Pryer, “does all this point to?  Firstly, to the duty of confession—­the outcry against which is absurd as an outcry would be against dissection as part of the training of medical students.  Granted these young men must see and do a great deal we do not ourselves like even to think of, but they should adopt some other profession unless they are prepared for this; they may even get inoculated with poison from a dead body and lose their lives, but they must stand their chance.  So if we aspire to be priests in deed as well as name, we must familiarise ourselves with the minutest and most repulsive details of all kinds of sin, so that we may recognise it in all its stages.  Some of us must doubtlessly perish spiritually in such investigations.  We cannot help it; all science must have its martyrs, and none of these will deserve better of humanity than those who have fallen in the pursuit of spiritual pathology.”