Wednesday, flounder—
and so forth. The only other scraps of the table talk which I retain are connected with Cornelia’s amused and amusing summary of a letter from Ethelwyn, who had visited her “Arabian saint” and reported that the leader of her party, an ex-Evangelical clergyman from Nebraska, who spoke only English and had never before been outside the United States, had, on being addressed by the saint in Arabic, understood perfectly everything that was said to him.
“My Lord!” Oliver exclaimed,—“I beg your pardon,—By Pollux! I wish I could get up my Vergil that way!” Dorothy said that she didn’t understand why her mother and the rest of them made so much fun of Cousin Ethelwyn: it seemed to her, she said demurely, “very much like Pentecost.” Father Blakewell explained the distinction, but I have forgotten just what it was. I infer that the children were cutting up a little on my account; for Oliver followed his sister with a grave-faced remonstrance against their “bigotry” toward the new mystical Oriental cults: they had something, he said, which people seemed to want; and, for his part, though he didn’t care for the style of their prophets, he thought there was a lot of common-sense in some of the Bahaist notions about world peace and about bringing forward the common ethical basis of all the great first-class religions.
“But Oliver dear,” said Cornelia, “you really wouldn’t care for these Orientals, if you had to associate with them. They are so—well, I suppose some of them may be clean. But for a really well-bred, intelligent woman, like Ethelwyn, to go trailing around the world after an ignorant barefooted Arabian peasant seems to me to be almost disgusting—it’s so—so eccentric.”
“I suppose,” replied her son, “that well-bred Romans of the first century felt very much as you do when Saint Paul, the humpbacked tailor of Tarsus, tried to introduce his Levantine fanaticisms into the Forum.”
“Oliver! That, you know, was very different,” said Cornelia. “Saint Paul was in the central religious tradition of the world: what Newman calls the ‘classical’ religion, the formative power in what he calls our ‘classical’ Western civilization. It means so much to be central and not eccentric.”
“Was Saint Paul ‘central’ when he appeared in Rome?” asked the incorrigible youth.
“You answer him, Mr. Blakewell,” said Cornelia.
“I think,” said the young man quietly and seriously, “that Saint Paul was central wherever he appeared.”
“I see,” said Oliver.