s. The burden of his reply was in these words: "I
cannot conceive that my daughter should give her heart to a man who was
not strong in the faith in which she has herself been nurtured. I would
gladly be otherwise convinced, but from all I can learn you are of those
who trust rather in the pride of intellect than in the humility of
Christian faith. "Why, my fair Jesuit, have you concealed your love as
well as this! I think no one could live in the same house with me without
hearing the bird that sings in my breast. You must tell your father the
whole truth.

Meanwhile I will write to him as best I can, but the real debate I must
leave until I come to Morningtown. And how shall I persuade him that I
have faith or that my faith is in any way an equivalent for his belief in
the Christian dogma? Will he listen to me if I say that a man may believe
the whole catechism and yet have no faith? Mankind, as I regard them, are
divided into two pretty distinct classes: those to whom the visible world
is real and the invisible world unreal or at best a shadow of the visible,
and those to whom this visible realm with all its life is mere illusion
whereas the spirit alone is the eternal reality. Faith is just this
perception of the illusion enwrapping all these phenomena that to those
without faith seem so real; faith is the voluntary turning away of the
spirit from this illusion toward the infinite reality. It is because I
find among the men of to-day no perception of this illusion that I deny
the existence of faith in the world. It is because men have utterly lost
the sense of this illusion that religion has descended into this Simony of
the humanitarians. How shall I tell your father this? I think we should do
better to discuss household economy than religion.

Just now I am forcibly detained in New York by a number of petty duties,
but in a few days I shall set forth on my second pilgrimage to
Morningtown. Shall I have any wit to persuade your father that my
"infidelity" is not the unpardonable sin, or that my love for you is
sufficient to cover even that sin and a host of others? And how will
Jessica meet me? She will not look now, I trust, for that cloven hoof
which I never had and those ass's ears which, alas! I did flourish so
portentously. Why, Jessica, according to your own words you will have a
strange double lover to greet, and I think it would be mathematically
correct if you gave two kisses in return for every one. It wi