yourself too hard, and I blame myself for letting you do so."

Mark did not feel that he could argue on this matter without giving his preaching an importance above its value. Besides, it was discipline to think that somebody else was right and to obey his judgment. Was not obedience one of the evangelical counsels?

CHAPTER XIX

MORALS

DROGO MORTEMER was probably wrong to debar Mark from preaching except in his own church, and to insist upon his concentrating so completely on his work in the confessional. Emotional fatigue had not been as dangerous as the moral fatigue that threatened Mark now that he was unable to find a sufficiently expressive outlet for his triumph or despair, now that day in day out during the whole of his thirty-second year he had to listen to the tale of human sin. At St. Chad's his duties in the confessional had been simple enough, although even there, toward the end of his time, the tendency had been for his stream of penitents to swell considerably compared with those of his colleagues; but here where he sat, still as a general practitioner, but as a general practitioner in a very fashionable street, the endless variations of human frailty slowly began to weigh upon his mind. In spite of a continuous effort to preserve his impersonality, and to regard himself as not much more than a piece of the floriated carving of the box itself, Mark found it increasingly difficult in the ordinary intercourse of existence to dissever himself from a point of view of men and women that would soon have made ordinary intercourse an impossibility.

"I shall always be glad to lend you any of my books, you know," Dayrell suggested to Mark one day. "I have all Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebbing, and there's this Viennese fellow Freud, who really throws a new light on certain sexual impulses."

"The Devil goes about with a new light all the time," Mark said. "No, thanks, Dayrell, I haven't forgotten that to know all is to pardon all; but we can leave that ultimate toleration to Almighty God, for He alone is likely

to know humanity as thoroughly as all that. Personally I think that all these books are dangerous to morals, because their tendency is to make us human beings too tolerant. They are all a subtle undermining of man's free will."

"But surely," Dayrell argued, "a priest has as much right, and more than right, as much duty to diagnose and heal the maladies of the soul and of the mind as a doctor to diagnose and heal the maladies of the body? Personally I have found my knowledge of psychopathy of the greatest value in the confessional."

"Have you?" Mark said. "I do not find that anything is of the least value except the grace of God working in the souls of my penitents to resist mortal sin.”

"Well, naturally I am not questioning that," Dayrell replied in some pique. "But, after all, it is only right that we priests should avail ourselves of the enormous additions made recently to our knowledge of the pathology of the mind and soul."

"You keep talking about maladies of the mind and soul. I don't accept the idea of psychic diseases analogous to mental diseases. The only malady of the soul that I recognize is the state of being in mortal sin."

"But surely," Dayrell persisted, "we are bound to recognize that the conditions of modern existence have added a great deal to the difficulties of the individual soul."

"To a certain extent in certain directions," Mark admitted. "But the conditions of modern existence are the result of sin. So long as material progress is largely based on envy, jealousy, ambition, lust for money, greed of luxury, and all the other sinful motives that prompt man to advance, so long will that advance involve him in yearly increasing temptation. I accept the fact that modern industrial conditions tend to encourage vice, but what else would you expect when you examine by what modern industrial conditions are created? We have nowadays a lot of compassion expended upon heredity, but what is heredity except the transmission of Adam's original sin? The whole tendency of modern thought and modern opinion and modern manners is to extenuate the

responsibility of human nature, not merely on the moral side, but equally on the spiritual side. From the moment that you begin to say that a certain dogma requires whittling down before it can be accepted by the modern man you invite a similar whittling down of moral obligations. Let a drunkard believe that he is less of a sinner because his father was a drunkard before him, and you may as well say that the Son of God was not Incarnate. God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, to the end that all that believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That is surely quite enough. Either God did do that, or He didn't. If He did, then it seems to me that we can safely leave the ultimate verdict upon humanity until the Day of Judgment. Meanwhile, our duty as priests of God is to trust in His mercy and occupy ourselves with the means of grace that He has given us by His own merits, not by our own."

"You must be a very severe confessor, Lidderdale. I'm astonished that you have so many penitents."

It struck Mark that there was a hint of jealousy in the way Dayrell said this, and he reproached himself for ascribing motives to other people without taking care first to look at his own. If there was jealousy in Dayrell, there was probably more than a little pride in himself.

"I don't think that I am very severe," he replied. "I doubt if I am severe enough."

"Of course you get a great many females," Dayrell went on. "It's strange how much women are always attracted to the dark ascetic type like yours. I suppose they like the leanness and length and harshness of it in contrast with their own flabbiness and floppiness and sponginess."

Mark began to feel irritated.

"I rather object to the suggestion that my personal appearance has anything to do with my success or failure as a confessor," he said. "Of course, it would be idle to deny that there are a lot of silly women who do bewitch themselves into supposing that the wretched creature sitting there in cassock and surplice has, as a man, some

dreadful attraction for them; but happily those women are exceptions."

"I meant no offence by what I said, Lidderdale. Perhaps it is because I find that my own personality is antipathetic to women generally that I was struck by the number of women I notice waiting their turn outside your box."

"But all this talk about personality is such rubbish," Mark exclaimed. "The only personality that is worth considering is a personality like Rowley's, so full to the brim of compassion, love, and desire for other people's happiness that contact with it was a refreshment to the weariest heart, the feeblest soul. Unless human personality succeeds in achieving that kind of sacramental quality, and unless it completely divests itself of its human self, so that an ugly, a really very ugly man like Rowley, achieves a beauty more dazzling than any material perfection of curve or colour, any occupation with one's own or another's personality always seems to me an imaginable occasion of sin."

"I don't wish to flatter you, Lidderdale, but it may be that your own personality has just the kind of effect you admired in Rowley."

"What perfect nonsense!" Mark ejaculated wrathfully. "Mine? Mine that has lost any capacity for love whatsoever? I should indeed find the priestly task easy if I were granted that radiancy of the indwelling Holy Spirit in the temple of a body like Rowley's, a radiancy that shone out like the windows of a church on a night of storm and wind. No, my whole difficulty is that, far from loving people, I am growing to hate them, and the endless string of confessions I have to endure is making me hate them more than ever."

"How odd! You never struck me that way," Dayrell exclaimed in obvious astonishment. "I should always have asserted most positively that you had a great affection for people. You hide your dislike of them very well."

"That's what worries me," Mark said, "for I loathe pretending.

"But did you always hate people?"