“I do not agree with you, Vergniaud,” he said—­“I fear it is because we do not think sufficiently for ourselves on the One eternal subject that so much mischief threatens us at the present time.  To take gifts and ignore the Giver is surely the blackest ingratitude, yet that is what the greater part of humanity is guilty of in these days.  Never was there so much beholding and yet ignoring of the Divine as now.  Science is searching for God, and is getting closer to Him every day;—­the Church remains stationary and refuses to look out beyond her own pale of thought and conventional discipline.  I know,—­” and the Cardinal hesitated a moment, “I know I can speak quite plainly to you, for you are what is called a freethinker—­yet I doubt whether you are really as free as you imagine!”

The Abbe shrugged his shoulders.

“I imagine nothing!” he declared airily, “Everything is imagined for me nowadays,—­and imagination itself is like a flying Geni which overtakes and catches the hair of some elusive Reality and turns its face round, full-shining on an amazed world!”

“A pretty simile!” said Angela Sovrani, smiling.

“Is it not?  Almost worthy of Paul Verlaine who was too ‘inspired’ to keep either his body or his soul clean.  Why was I not a poet!  Helas!—­Fact so much outweighs fancy that it is no longer any use penning a sonnet to one’s mistress’s eyebrow.  One needs to write with thunderbolts in characters of lightning, to express the wonders and discoveries of this age.  When I find I can send a message from here to London across space, without wires or any visible means of communication,—­and when I am told that probably one of these days I shall be able at will to see the person to whom I send the message, reflected in space while the message is being delivered,—­I declare myself so perfectly satisfied with the fairy prodigies revealed to me, that I have really no time, and perhaps no inclination to think of any other world than this one.”

“You are wrong, then,” said the Cardinal, “Very wrong, Vergniaud.  To me these discoveries of science, this apparent yielding of invisible forces into human hands, are signs and portents of terror.  You remember the line ‘the powers of heaven shall be shaken’?  Those powers are being shaken now!  We cannot hold them back;—­they are here, with us;—­but they mean much more than mere common utility to our finite selves.  They are the material declarations of what is spiritual.  They are the scientific proofs that Christ’s words to ‘this generation,’ namely, this particular phase of creation,—­are true.  ‘Blessed are they which have not seen and yet believed,’ He said;—­and many there are who have passed away from us in rapt faith and hope, believing not seeing, and with whom we may rejoice in spirit, knowing that all must be well with them.  But now—­now we are come upon an age of doubt in the world—­doubt which corrodes and kills the divine spirit in man, and therefore we are being forced to see that we may believe,—­but the seeing is terrible!”