"If I had a blow on the back of my head, I might come to think
you a green elephant," answered MacIan, "but have I not the right
to say now, that if I thought that I should think wrong?"

"Then you are quite certain that it would be wrong to like me?"
asked Turnbull, with a slight smile.

"No," said Evan, thoughtfully, "I do not say that. It may not be
the devil, it may be some part of God I am not meant to know. But
I had a work to do, and it is making the work difficult."

"And I suppose," said the atheist, quite gently, "that you and I
know all about which part of God we ought to know."

MacIan burst out like a man driven back and explaining
everything.

"The Church is not a thing like the Athenaeum Club," he cried.
"If the Athenaeum Club lost all its members, the Athenaeum Club
would dissolve and cease to exist. But when we belong to the
Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which
is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and
the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If
we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist
in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its
existence than I am of my own existence? And yet you ask me to
trust my temperament, my own temperament, which can be turned
upside down by two bottles of claret or an attack of the
jaundice. You ask me to trust that when it softens towards you