, multiply it; where is there a limit
here, except in God's law? I am not speaking of any Church. You have,
so much I know, busied yourself chiefly with history?"

"Not so particularly."

"Well, you know this much: no people, no State, can be free, at least
we have no historical instance to the contrary, no people, no State,
can be free without a positive Church; there must be something
immovably fixed, and at this very day the Americans are free, only
because they subject themselves to religion."

"Or, rather, enfranchise it," Eric interposed, without being heard.

The priest continued:--

"I think that you desire to make a free man of this youth. We also love
free men, we want free men, but there can be no free men without a
positive religion, and, in truth, without one requiring a strict, legal
obedience. The highest result of education is equanimity--note it
well--equanimity. Can your world-wisdom produce a harmony of all the
tendencies and dispositions of the soul, a quietude of the spirit, a
state of self-renunciation, because our whole life is one continual act
of self-sacrifice? If you can produce the same result as religion,
then, justified by the result, you agree with us. For my own part, I
doubt whether you can; and we wait for the proof, which you have yet to
give, while we have furnished it now for a thousand years, and still
daily furnish it."

"Religion," replied Eric, "is a concomitant of civilization; but it is
not the whole of civilization, and this is the distinction between us
and the ecclesiastics. But we are not to blame for the opposition
between science and religion."

"Science," interposed the priest, "has nothing to do with the eternal
life. Although one has electric telegraphs and sewing machines, that
has no relation to the eternal life. This eternal life is given only by
religion, and its essence remains the same, no matter how many
thousand, and thousand upon thousand, inventions he may devise in his
finite existence."

Eric inquired now in a diffident tone,--

"But how can the Church itself possess riches?"

"The Church does not possess, it only administers," the priest sharply
answered.

"I think that we are getting too far away from the point," Eric said,
coming back to the subject. "As we cannot expect that Herr Sonnenkamp
and his son Roland will give away all their property, the question
returns, how shall we get the right hold?"

"Precisely so," cried the ecclesiasti