not.... Where was I? Oh, yes.... Well, that cleared the ground for us,
and the Church made extraordinary progress for a while--extraordinary,
that is, under the circumstances, because you must remember, things were
very different from twenty, or even ten, years before. I mean that,
roughly speaking, the severing of the sheep and the goats had begun. The
religious people were practically all Catholics and Individualists; the
irreligious people rejected the supernatural altogether, and were, to a
man, Materialists and Communists. But we made progress because we had a
few exceptional men--Delaney the philosopher, McArthur and Largent, the
philanthropists, and so on. It really seemed as if Delaney and his
disciples might carry everything before them. You remember his
'Analogy'? Oh, yes, it is all in the text-books....

"Well, then, at the close of the Vatican Council, which had been called
in the nineteenth century, and never dissolved, we lost a great number
through the final definitions. The 'Exodus of the Intellectuals' the
world called it---"

"The Biblical decisions," put in the younger priest.

"That partly; and the whole conflict that began with the rise of
Modernism at the beginning of the century but much more the condemnation
of Delaney, and of the New Transcendentalism generally, as it was then
understood. He died outside the Church, you know. Then there was the
condemnation of Sciotti's book on Comparative Religion.... After that
the Communists went on by strides, although by very slow ones. It seems
extraordinary to you, I dare say, but you cannot imagine the excitement
when the _Necessary Trades Bill_ became law in '60. People thought that
all enterprise would stop when so many professions were nationalised;
but, you know, it didn't. Certainly the nation was behind it."