"When I meant to take them, it was the same thing."
"Do I understand you that to intend to do a thing and then to change the mind is the same as to do it?"
"Oh, no; not that; but I am not clear that it isn't my duty to take them. I'm not sure that it is right for a priest to marry—if you will pardon my saying so."
"And you come to me to convince you? It seems to me that Providence has already done that through the agency of some young woman. If you really know what it is to love a good woman there is no real doubt in your mind as to the sacredness of marriage,—for the clergy or for anybody else. Isn't your trouble perhaps an obstinate dislike to seem to abandon a position once taken?"
The words might have sounded severe but for the tone in which they were spoken.
"But that is not the whole of the matter," Maurice continued, feeling as if he were being carried forward by an irresistible current. "If I have been mistaken on this point about which I have felt so sure and so strongly, what confidence can I have in my other beliefs?"
"Ah, it goes deep," Strathmore said with emphasis. "It is of no use to put old wine into new bottles. The effect of trying to make you young men accept mediævalism, like clerical celibacy, is in the end to make you doubt everything. Haven't you any respect for the authority of the church?"
"Oh, implicit!" Maurice responded.
"But," his host remarked with a smile, "because you begin to have doubts about a thing which the church doesn't inculcate, you show an inclination to throw overboard all that she does teach."
Maurice was silent a moment, playing with a rosary which he wore at his belt. He was surprised that he had never thought of this; and he was startled by the doubt which had arisen in his mind as soon as he had declared his implicit faith in the church. He realized in a flash that while he had spoken honestly, he had not told the truth.