I handled the little duodecimo with suspicion; then gave it back.
"It has done you a lot of good, I suppose?" I said, I am afraid, with a certain amount of contempt.
"I can't say it has," he replied sadly; then lapsed into moody reflection.
Now, gloom is the one thing I cannot tolerate; so to rouse him from his reverie, and possibly from a slight, venial prompting of curiosity, I asked him to read some passages for me.
"My old sight cannot bear much of a strain," I said, "and the print is mighty small. Now, like a good fellow, pick out some good things, and read them slowly, for perhaps I may require to punctuate them."
So he read in a calm even monotone, without inflection, but with many pauses, whilst I watched every syllable and measured it.
"I have a strong objection to a voyage pittoresque through the planets; we bear in our own breasts a heaven full of constellations. There is in our hearts an inward, spiritual world, that breaks like a sun upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same spiritual worlds? The atheist should ask himself how he received the giant idea of God, that he has neither opposed nor embodied. An idea that has not grown up by comparing different degrees of greatness, as it is the opposite of every measure and degree. In fact, the atheist speaks as others of prototype and original."
"Stop there," I cried; "why that is the ontological argument of St. Anselm, adopted afterwards by a soldier philosopher like yourself, called Descartes. There's nothing new under the sun. It is wonderful how modern artists can refurbish our old Masters and make wonderful pictures from them!"
"Quite so," he replied, "in lieu of yourselves. There, now, I am always too precipitate; pardon me, sir, if I am too bold; but you Catholics have a wonderful talent for burying your treasures in napkins. Have you any treatise on the immortality of the soul in English, and in such a style as this?"
"I am afraid," I replied, as I looked askance at the volume, "that just now I cannot mention one. But go on, if it does not tire you. Time is the cheapest thing we have in Ireland."