“Why should we be loyal to Queen Victoria or Kaiser Wilhelm, either?” asked Louis, speaking for the first time. “She’s a good woman, and he’s a great soldier; but that has nothing to do with us.”
“That is exactly what I mean,” said Ernest Clare. “The idea of superiority of birth is rapidly decaying, Dr. Richards; we have almost come to believe that all men are created free and equal; after a bit, we shall come to the ‘inalienable rights.’ I am not at all afraid but that the Declaration will take care of itself. As for your impossible equation, you must bear in mind the conditions of the problem. If ‘gradual enfranchisement’ equal x, and brotherly love on both sides equal y, then, indeed, 1 + y = x + 100m might be possible and welcome! I won’t stickle for the form of a commune, so long as I have the spirit.”
“Ah—h!” cried Father McClosky, “ye’ve got to firm ground at last, ye bog-trotter! the very ground where the Church has been intrenched for eighteen hundred years!”
“And high time,” said Ernest Clare with quiet intensity, “that she should take up the ark of the Lord, and bear it across Jordan into the Promised Land.”
“I don’t quite understand you,” said the doctor curiously. He was intensely interested in the theories and beliefs of his new friend, which, as the reader may have observed, he only opposed to draw out more fully.
“Why, you know, of course, that communism is the theory of the Church,” said Mr. Clare. “Marion Crawford brings that out very well in his ‘Saracinesca;’ but Crawford—I hope I don’t do him injustice—seems to me a dilettante in religion and politics, who doesn’t believe anything deeply enough to fight for it.”
“Aha!” cried Father McClosky, “there’s the blood of ould Ireland at last!”
“Fighting with one’s pen is quite in accordance with the spirit of the age,” replied Mr. Clare calmly.
“But not argument, hey?”
“Not unless you are sure of convincing your man,” was the reply. “Well, Dr. Richards, to take up our subject where it was broken off by this discourteous Irishman, I have sometimes fancied that one of the differences of opinion between St. Paul and the Church of Jerusalem may have been that they wished to insist on the Gentile converts holding all their possessions in common, as did those at Jerusalem, while St. Paul, as a man of the world, saw that this was inexpedient, if not impossible, at that time.”