mere lustful
enjoyment. But the Church does not teach that men can make the mistake
when in hell of actually believing themselves in Heaven; that would be
too dangerous. Turn on that tap, and the jasper sea in which your angels
take their baths will run dry."

She looked at him half quizzically. "And what is your doctrine?" she
inquired. "When you are enjoying yourself--saying things like that, for
instance, hoping to hurt--do you ever think that you are in hell?"

"No," said Max, "I do not make enjoyment the test. Just now, for
instance, I rather feel that I may be at the gates of Heaven; but I am
not, therefore, superlatively happy. Can you promise me that the
heavenly road is one of pure happiness?"

"To any one who accepted absolutely the Divine Will it must be."

"The Divine Will," said Max, "gave me my body and my reasoning power.
You must not ask me to forfeit them. I agree with that old collegiate (a
doctor of divinity like myself) to whom one of more austere piety had
declared 'abject submission' the only possible attitude of the creature
toward his Creator. 'No, no!' protested the Doctor, with outraged
dignity, 'deference, but not--not abject submission!' Deference is all a
man can honestly promise so long as reason remains to him; abject
submission is fit only for lunatic asylums."

"And yet," she retorted, "abject submission to antecedents is all that
science can infer when once it starts to investigate the springs of
action."

"That is not to deny reason; that only conditions it. I wanted you to
accuse me of blasphemy; but as you do not give me my legitimate openings
I have to make them for myself. To me the abrogation of reason, on any
pretense, is the most rooted blasphemy of which the mind of man is
capable. Some modern Romanist penned once a hymn which had in it these
or like words for its refrain--

'And black is white,
And wrong is right,
If it be Thy sweet Will.'

That, to my mind, is a blasphemous utterance, for it juggles with the
fundamentals of all morality. The person who adopts that attitude as an
act of surrender to earthly love is a sensualist. It is a form of
sensualism rampant in women; and men encourage it by bestowing upon it
the names of womanly virtues. To adopt a similar attitude in spiritual
matters seems to me sensualism none the less. And what a hot-bed for
that sort of sensualism the Church has always been and still is!"

His ugly talk roused her spirit o