ages of the childhood of the race. They have terrifying dreams
of awful monsters and giant animals of which they have never so much
as heard in their waking hours; they pass through the lust for digging
caves, building fires, sleeping out in the woods, hunting with bows
and arrows--all remote ancestral impulses; they play games with stones,
marbles, and so on at regular stated periods of the year which they
instinctively know, just as they were played in the Bronze Age, and
heaven only knows how much earlier. But the boy goes through all this,
and leaves it behind him--so completely that the grown man feels himself
more a stranger among boys of his own place who are thinking and doing
precisely the things he thought and did a few years before, than he
would among Kurds or Esquimaux. But the woman is totally different. She
is infinitely more precocious as a girl. At an age when her slow brother
is still stubbing along somewhere in the neolithic period, she has flown
way ahead to a kind of mediaeval stage, or dawn of mediaevalism, which
is peculiarly her own. Having got there, she stays there; she dies
there. The boy passes her, as the tortoise did the hare. He goes on,
if he is a philosopher, and lets her remain in the dark ages, where she
belongs. If he happens to be a fool, which is customary, he stops and
hangs around in her vicinity."

Theron smiled. "We priests," he said, and paused again to enjoy the
words--"I suppose I oughtn't to inquire too closely just where we belong
in the procession."

"We are considering the question impersonally," said the doctor. "First
of all, what you regard as religion is especially calculated to attract
women. They remain as superstitious today, down in the marrow of their
bones, as they were ten thousand years ago. Even the cleverest of
them are secretly afraid of omens, and respect auguries. Think of the
broadest women you know. One of them will throw salt over her shoulder
if she spills it. Another drinks money from her cup by skimming the
bubbles in a spoon. Another forecasts her future by the arrangement of
tea-grounds. They make the constituency to which an institution based
on mysteries, miracles, and the supernatural generally, would naturally
appeal. Secondly, there is the personality of the priest."

"Yes," assented Ware. There rose up before him, on the instant, the
graceful, portly figure and strong, comely face of Father Forbes.

"Women are not a metaphysical people. T