"I beg your pardon; I really was trying to be delicately indirect. But that you should beg off discussion because my way of putting things seems to you indelicate is yet another count in my quarrel with your established ministry. You seem to me to be amateurs where you ought to be professionals. How can you possibly deal with poor weak humanity in kid gloves? Like the surgeon before he can hope to bring healing in his wings, you too must be anatomical in your researches. It is the anatomical your civil churchmen fight shy of. Well, I will endeavor to get at the matter from another and a more accessible side. Your Grace is, I take it, a man of the world?"
The Archbishop was inclined to demur; humbly but firmly he deprecated the imputation.
"But surely!" protested the Prince, "had you not been, you would not now be in the place which you occupy; every one knows that an Archbishop's appointment is political. I ask you then, as a man of the world, how—short of a miracle—could you expect a man in my position and circumstances to have kept a technically unblemished record? Surrounded with luxuries from my birth, disciplined by no real hardship, having to make no struggle for my existence; brought up to eat meat and drink wine; athletic, but without any reason or opportunity for leading a strenuously athletic life; with brains, but with no compulsion to use them; passed, for the perfecting of my education, from one privileged grade to another; from the University to the Army, and from thence to sport and the race-course; from where on God's earth, in this modern curriculum for kings, was the idea to have occurred to me that I should do this thing, in attempting to do which your early hermits went hullabalooing to the desert?
"I am now nearly twenty-six. My father, for reasons of State, married at twenty-one: I, for similar reasons, have been kept unmarried, no sufficiently eligible partner could be found for me. And I solved the time of waiting by contracting a non-legal conjugal relationship with a woman for whom I had a very real affection, who was considerably my senior in years, and who knew quite well that the arrangement could only be temporary. My Lord Archbishop, I ask you—could you in my circumstances have shown a better, a more blameless record? I was even punctilious enough to tell your daughter—an excessive scruple, I think,—she did not understand."
"She understands now," said the Archbishop.
"And who is it," inquired the Prince sharply, "who has thus played bo-peep with her intelligence—first shutting and now opening her eyes?"
"When evil is encountered," said his Grace, "instruction has to be extended."
"And still you have stopped halfway, just at the point where it serves you best. What does her pure soul know of these problems which to her are only a few hours old?"
"She is a daughter of the Church; and she knows what the Church's answer has always been."
"She knows, then," said Max, "what no school of historians has yet been able to decide! See over in England to-day how the Church, clinging to its establishment, has to dodge and shuffle over the changes in the moral law arising out of national habit. Is the Church of Jingalo so greatly superior, think you, that it can boast?"