“So we Catholics feel,” said Fitzgerald, “and this is, as I have implied, the great truth which we owe to the life and work of Newman. He has saved us from any temptation to compromise with Atheism. We are to stand to our guns, and, if we must perish, perish there!”
“The only thing is,” Gildea answered ruefully, “that no great spiritual movement, religious or otherwise, was ever yet produced, retained, or destroyed by the action of logic, and they have all partaken largely of the nature of compromise. Voltaire and the philosophes sent such a douche of logic onto Christianity in France that they literally beat it out of the country, but it came back again. And why? Because it contained the satisfaction of the demands of one side of Humanity which Logic had not, and could not have. Well, they compromised the matter, and the result is, (Dare I declare it, Fitzgerald?), none other than men like the fine and intellectual ecclesiastics who presided over the education of that lay priest, as he calls himself, Ernest Renan. History repeats itself. What Logic tried to do yesterday, Science is trying to do to-day. And, as you,” (he turned his eyes to Fitzgerald), “foresee, Christianity, and Religion generally will suffer a defeat and even decapitation, only to return with processions, ringing of bells and the glad shouts of the populace. Then the Parliament will shut up all the sunday theatres, and the skeletons of Professor Huxley and Herbert Spencer will be removed from the Pantheon at Westminster and lodged in Madame Tussaud’s, and the land have rest—for the space of forty years!”
“Well,” said Alcock, “you young gentlemen are getting too far head for steady-going seniors like Dr. Maddock and myself. We will ask for matches, and smoke a cigar, while you tell us all about our great-great-grandchildren.”
Cigars, cigarettes, and lights were brought and, with some pleasant small talk, the party loosened and eased its position at table and physical and mental state generally.
“Talking of compromise,” said Hawkesbury, taking his cigarette from his lips and leaning the elbow of the hand that held it on the table, “between Religion and Logic, or Reason, is not, what is called, Positivism an attempt to organise such a compromise?”
Gildea began to laugh.
“Ah,” he said, “is not Arnold’s ‘grotesque old french pedant,’ a late foolish Monsieur Comte, as Carlyle would say, to leave me alone even beyond ‘the long wash of Australian seas?’ Am I to be persecuted even here by his tiresome adaptations and school-boy notions, all bundled up in superlatively bad French?—You do not know,” he added, “what I chance to have suffered at the hands of my positivist friends at home, or I am sure you would not ask me to discuss them here where I am come for a holiday. They and Mr. Mallock are the most tiresome people in existence. You have heard of Mr. Mallock out here? and of his tilts with the junior Positivists?”
Hawkesbury acquiesced.
“We have heard of everything out here,” he said smiling.