g your gods to earth if you would raise your
worshippers to heaven. After all, simplicity rather than knowledge is
the keynote of happiness."

"You would trick your penitents into paradise?"

"Perhaps I am obtuse, but it seems to me that this is _your_ design, not
mine."

"What does the Church offer," said Paul, "that the human mind can grasp?
What hope do you extend to the sorrowing widow of a man who has died
unrepentant and full of sin? Eternal loss. Is this to be her reward for
years of faithful love? If, upon her death-bed, the woman of atrocious
life can be bullied into uttering words of penitence she is 'saved.' If
she die as she lived, if a shot, a knife, a street accident cut her off
in the midst of her sinning, she is 'lost.' A moment of panic wins
salvation for the one; a life-time of self-denial counts for nothing in
the case of another. If I go out into the street and strike down a
bawd--a thing lower than the lowest animal and more noxious--I hang. If
I don the King's uniform and accept the orders of an officer, I may slay
good men and bad, come who may, and die assured of heaven. It is war.
Why is it war? Simply because it is slaughter as opposed to slaying. Our
cause, you will say, is just. So is my cause against the pander."

"You are, then, a novel sort of conscientious objector?"

"Not at all. If at the price of my life I could exterminate every living
thing that is Prussian I should do it. But I know _why_ I should do it,
and why I should be justified. If one troubled with doubts upon such a
score were to ask your cloth to resolve them, he would be told that he
fought for King and Country, or something equally beside the point.
Patriotism, my lord, becomes impossible when we realise that in turn we
have inhabited many countries. You were once perhaps an Austrian, and
may yet be a Turk."

"The theory of re-incarnation, Mr. Mario, helps to people our lunatic
asylums. I was assured recently by a well-known brain specialist that
the claimants to the soul of Cleopatra would out-number the Hippodrome
'Beauty Chorus.'"

"You speak of the 'theory' of re-incarnation, yet it was taught by
Christ."

"There we arrive at a definite point of divergence, Mr. Mario," said his
lordship. "Let us agree to differ, for I perceive that no other form of
agreement is possible between us."

* * * * *

"There is something frightfully unsatisfactory about bishops," declared
Thessaly,