“So were many of the Greek sophists,” George Bridges observed.

“Now if it were only dear old Doctor Gilman,” Eleanor continued, “I could sink back into a comfortable indifference.  But every Sunday this new man stirs me up, not by what he says, but by what he is.  I hoped we’d get a rector with modern ideas, who would be able to tell me what to teach my children.  Little Phil and Harriet come back from Sunday school with all sorts of questions, and I feel like a hypocrite.  At any rate, if Mr. Hodder hasn’t done anything else, he’s made me want to know.”

“What do you mean by a man of modern ideas, Eleanor?” inquired Mr. Bridges, with evident relish.

Eleanor put down her coffee cup, looked at him helplessly, and smiled.

“Somebody who will present Christianity to me in such a manner that it will appeal to my reason, and enable me to assimilate it into my life.”

“Good for you, Nell,” said her husband, approvingly.  “Come now, professor, you sit up in the University’ Club all Sunday morning and discuss recondite philosophy with other learned agnostics, tell us what is the matter with Mr. Hodder’s theology.  That is, if it will not shock grandmother too much.”

“I’m afraid I’ve got used to being shocked, Phil,” said Mrs. Waring, with her quiet smile.

“It’s unfair,” Mr. Bridges protested, “to ask a prejudiced pagan like me to pronounce judgment on an honest parson who is labouring according to his lights.”

“Go on, George.  You shan’t get out of it that way.”

“Well,” said George, “the trouble is, from the theological point of view, that your parson is preaching what Auguste Sabatier would call a diminished and mitigated orthodoxy.”

“Great heavens!” cried Phil.  “What’s that?”

“It’s neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring,” the professor declared.  “If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn’t maintain that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won’t assert that he hasn’t.  The mediaeval conception of the Church, before Luther’s day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the premises on which it was based.”

“What premises?”

“That the Almighty had given it a charter, like an insurance company, of a monopoly of salvation on this portion of the Universe, and agreed to keep his hands off.  Under this conception, the sale of indulgences, masses for the soul, and temporal power are perfectly logical —­inevitable.  Kings and princes derive their governments from the Church.  But if we once begin to doubt the validity of this charter, as the Reformers did, the whole system flies to pieces, like sticking a pin into a soap bubble.

“That is the reason why—­to change the figure—­the so-called Protestant world has been gradually sliding down hill ever since the Reformation.  The great majority of men are not willing to turn good, to renounce the material and sensual rewards under their hands without some definite and concrete guaranty that, if they do so, they are going, to be rewarded hereafter.  They demand some sort of infallibility.  And when we let go of the infallibility of the Church, we began to slide toward what looked like a bottomless pit, and we clutched at the infallibility of the Bible.  And now that has begun to roll.