"You must not laugh at me. Tell me, how do you like my friend
Valencia?"
"Well enough. I want to hear more about your confession. You fall back into the bosom of your Church with joy, I suppose?"
"Ay!"
"And you would never disobey one of her mandates?"
"Holy God! no."
"Why?"
"Why? Because I am a Catholic."
"That is not what I asked you. Why are you a Catholic? if I must make myself more plain. Why are you afraid to disobey? Why do you cling to the Church with your back braced against your intelligence? It is hope of future reward, I suppose,—or fear?"
"Sure. I want to go to the heaven of the good Catholic."
"Do not waste this life, particularly the youth of it, preparing for a legendary hereafter. Granting, for the sake of argument, that this existence is supplemented by another: you have no knowledge of what elements you will be composed when you lay aside your mortal part to enter there. Your power of enjoyment may be very thin indeed, like the music of a band without brass; the sort of happiness one can imagine a human being to experience out of whose anatomy the nervous system has by some surgical triumph been removed, and in whom love of the arts alone exists, abnormally cultivated. But one thing we of earth do know; you do not, but I will tell you; we have a slight capacity for happiness and a large capacity for enjoyment. There is not much in life, God knows, but there is something. One can get a reasonable amount out of it with due exercise of philosophy. Of that we are sure. Of what comes after we are absolutely unsure."