"What's dangerous? You look so solemn that you really make me feel quite nervous. What's dangerous?"
"Why, your words. I see in you, I think, a kind of leaning toward Rome."
"It isn't Rome," said Minnie. "I don't lean to Rome. I only lean a little toward a Roman Catholic priest."
"Worse and worse," said Tozer. "Dear! dear! dear! worse and worse. This beats all. Young woman, beware! But perhaps I don't understand you. You surely don't mean that your affections are engaged to any Roman Catholic priest. You can't mean that. Why, they can't marry."
"But that's just what I like them so for," said Minnie. "I like people that don't marry; I hate people that want to marry."
Tozer turned this over in his mind, but could make nothing of it. At length he thought he saw in this an additional proof that she had been tampered with by Jesuits at Rome. He thought he saw in this a statement of her belief in the Roman Catholic doctrine of celibacy.
He shook his head more solemnly than ever. "It's not Gospel," said he. "It's mere human tradition. Why, for centuries there was a married priesthood even in the Latin Church. Dunstan's chief measures consisted in a fierce war on the married clergy. So did Hildebrand's—Gregory the Seventh, you know. The Church at Milan, sustained by the doctrines of the great Ambrose, always preferred a married clergy. The worst measures of Hildebrand were against these good pastors and their wives. And in the Eastern Church they have always had it."
Of course all this was quite beyond Minnie; so she gave a little sigh, and said nothing.
"Now as to Rome," resumed Tozer. "Have you ever given a careful study to the Apocalypse—not a hasty reading, as people generally do, but a serious, earnest, and careful examination?"
"I'm sure I haven't any idea what in the world you're talking about," said Minnie. "I wish you wouldn't talk so. I don't understand one single word of what you say."