or authority to any man past sixty, but the Head of the Church may be so old that he can hardly move one foot before the other, yet he is permitted to be declared the representative of the ever-working, ever-helping, ever-comforting Christ, who never knew what it was to be old!  Enough, however of this strange superstition which is only one of many in the Church, and which are all the result of double or perverted sight,—­I come to the last part of the text which runs, ’If therefore the light in thee be darkness how great is that darkness.’  If therefore the light in thee be darkness!  My friends, that is exactly my condition, and has been my condition ever since I was twenty.  The light in me has been darkness.  The intellectual quality of my brain which has helped me to attain my present false position among you . . .”

Here he paused, for there was a distinct movement of surprise among his audience, which till now, had remained to a man so still that the buzz of a fly on the window-pane sounded almost as loud as the drone of a bag-pipe,—­then with a faint smile on his lips he resumed,—­

“I hope you all heard my words distinctly!  I said, the false position I have attained among you.  I repeat it lest there should be any mistake.  It is a false position and always has been.  I have never for an instant believed half what I have asked you to believe!  And I have preached to you what I have never dreamed of practising!  Yet I venture to say that I am not worse than most of my brethren.  The intellectual men of France, whether clergy or laity, are in a difficult situation.  Their brains are keen and clear; and, intellectually speaking, they are totally unable to accept the Church superstitions of the tenth and twelfth centuries.  But in rejecting superstition it would have been quite possible to have held them fast to a sublime faith in God and an Immortal Future, had the Church caught them when slipping, and risen to the mental demand made upon her resources.  But the old worn-out thunder of the Vatican, which lately made a feeble noise in America, has rolled through France with the same assertion, ’Discussion cannot be tolerated’; and what has been the result?  Simply this,—­that all the intellectual force of the country is arrayed against priestcraft;—­ and the spirit of an insolent, witty, domineering atheism and materialism rules us all.  Even young children can be found by the score who laugh at the very idea of a God, and who fling a jeer at the story of the Crucifixion of Christ,—­while vice and crime are tolerated and often excused.  Moral restraint is being less and less enforced, and the clamouring for sensual indulgence has become so incessant that the desire of the whole country, if put into one line, might be summed up in the impotent cry of the Persian voluptuary Omar Khayyam to his god, ’Reconcile the law to my desires’.  This is as though a gnat should