chronometer like the quiet thrill of satisfaction when
the fellow brought me the pawn ticket and told me that
the thirty shillings had been useful?

Leslie Duncan got out at Carstairs, and I was left
alone with a hale, white-haired, old Roman Catholic
priest, who had sat quietly reading his office in the
corner. We fell into the most intimate talk, which
lasted all the way to Avonmouth--indeed, so interested
was I that I very nearly passed through the place without
knowing it. Father Logan (for that was his name) seemed
to me to be a beautiful type of what a priest should be--
self-sacrificing and pure-minded, with a kind of simple
cunning about him, and a deal of innocent fun. He had
the defects as well as the virtues of his class, for he
was absolutely reactionary in his views. We discussed
religion with fervour, and his theology was somewhere
about the Early Pliocene. He might have chattered the
matter over with a priest of Charlemagne's Court, and
they would have shaken hands after every sentence. He
would acknowledge this and claim it as a merit. It
was consistency in his eyes. If our astronomers and
inventors and law-givers had been equally consistent
where would modern civilisation be? Is religion the only
domain of thought which is non-progressive, and to be
referred for ever to a standard set two thousand years
ago? Can they not see that as the human brain evolves it
must take a wider outlook? A half-formed brain makes a
half-formed God, and who shall say that our brains are
even half-formed yet? The truly inspired priest is the