Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/208

 Lending Library. Miss Pratt, the autocrat of the circle, observes that the story of "Father Clement" is, in itself, a library on the errors of Romanism, whereupon old Mrs. Linnet very sensibly replies: "One 'ud think there did n't want much to drive people away from a religion as makes 'em walk barefoot over stone floors, like that girl in 'Father Clement,' sending the blood up to the head frightful. Anybody might see that was an unnat'ral creed."

So they might; and a more unnatural creed than Father Clement's Catholicism was never devised for the extinction of man's flickering reason. Only the mental debility of the Clarenham family can account for their holding such views long enough to admit of their being converted from them by the Montagus. Only the militant spirit of the Clarenham chaplain and the Montagu chaplain makes possible several hundred pages of polemics. Montagu Bibles run the blockade, are discovered in the hands of truth-seeking Clarenhams, and are hurled back upon the spiritual assailants. The determination of Father Dennis that the Scriptures shall be quoted in Latin only (a practice which