Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/179

 pace the narrow room. The demon had risen now, alive and fearful. He told Fulco things which had long been hidden in his heart which he had told to no one since the day he entered the Church. The heretic churches were no better, he cried, because they tried to mingle faith with reason and that could not be done. All that the Church taught was a legend and a superstition. To believe, one had to be as simple as the most ignorant man. To believe, one must be stupid and afraid. Had he not brought souls to the Church? Had he not brought money to the Church? It was for that he worked and that alone. Did he not know these things? Had he not lived with the Church for nearly half a century? Not because he believed, but because it was a profession, a career.

And this whole affair of the Spragg woman was nonsense—the concoction of a half-insane nun and a malicious peasant woman who hated priests. And if even such things could be, if they were true, the Church would not make a saint of her, because it had no need of saints at the moment. The same miracle had happened to more than a hundred others. It was on record. They were always hysterical women. No great organization could saint every woman who saw fit to produce miraculous scars on her body. The Church made saints when it needed them and where it needed them. It was not an affair left to the Divine Will of God. It was geography and politics.

The Church was not rich and powerful because it was the instrument of God, but because the men in the Church had made it so. They were politicians.