A few whiffs in silence, and then he said:
“I thought so.”
“What did you think?”
“That you were a reader of the Journal of the Age. Most youngsters who read anything above a sporting journal or a sensational novel are. I have been a student of it myself—a very close student. I knew the editor well. We were at one time bosom friends. He took me in training, and I recognized the symptoms in you at once.”
“How so?”
“The Journal of the Age—and it has numerous admirers and imitators—is, in these days, the ablest organ of a great and almost universal worship of an awful trinity that has existed since man was first created; and the name of that awful trinity is—the devil, the world, and the flesh.”
I stared at him in silent astonishment. All the gayety of his manner, all its softness, had gone, and he seemed in deadly earnest, as he went on:
“This worship is not paraded in its grossest form. Not at all. It is graced by all that wit can give and undisciplined intellect devise. It has a brilliant sneer for Faith, a scornful smile for Hope, and a chill politeness for Charity. I revelled in it for a time. Heaven forgive me! I was happy enough to escape.”
“With what result?”
“Briefly with this: with the conviction that man did not make this world; that he did not make himself, or send himself into it; that consequently he was not and could never be absolutely his own master; that he was sent in and called out by Another, by a Greater than he, by a Creator, by a God. I became and am a Catholic, to find that what for a time I had blindly worshipped were the three enemies against whom I was warned to fight all the days of my life.”