omeliest,
most vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind in spite of centuries
of endeavour to extirpate it. If a vice in spite of such efforts can
still hold its own among the most polished nations, it must be founded on
some immutable truth or fact in human nature, and must have some
compensatory advantage which we cannot afford altogether to dispense
with."

"But," said Ernest timidly, "is not this virtually doing away with all
distinction between right and wrong, and leaving people without any moral
guide whatever?"

"Not the people," was the answer: "it must be our care to be guides to
these, for they are and always will be incapable of guiding themselves
sufficiently. We should tell them what they must do, and in an ideal
state of things should be able to enforce their doing it: perhaps when we
are better instructed the ideal state may come about; nothing will so
advance it as greater knowledge of spiritual pathology on our own part.
For this, three things are necessary; firstly, absolute freedom in
experiment for us the clergy; secondly, absolute knowledge of what the
laity think and do, and of what thoughts and actions result in what
spiritual conditions; and thirdly, a compacter organisation among
ourselves.

"If we are to do any good we must be a closely united body, and must be
sharply divided from the laity. Also we must be free from those ties
which a wife and children involve. I can hardly express the horror with
which I am filled by seeing English priests living in what I can only
designate as 'open matrimony.' It is deplorable. The priest must be
absolutely sexless--if not in practice, yet at any rate in theory,
absolutely--and that too, by a theory so universally accepted that none
shall venture to dispute it."

"But," said Ernest, "has not the Bible already told people what they
ought and ought not to do, and is it not enough for us to insist on what
can be found here, and let the rest alone?"

"If you begin with the Bible," was the rejoinder, "you are three parts
gone on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part before you
know where you are. The Bible is not without its value to us the clergy,
but for the laity it is a stumbling-block which cannot be taken out of
their way too soon or too completely. Of course, I mean on the
supposition that they read it, which, happily, they seldom do. If people
read the Bible as the ordinary British churchman or churchwoman reads it,
i