At the command of Father Forbes, a lad who was loitering near them went down through the throng to the bar, and returned with three glasses of beer. It pleased the Rev. Mr. Ware that the priest should have taken it for granted that he would do as the others did. He knocked his glass against theirs in compliance with a custom strange to him, but which they seemed to understand very well. The beer itself was not so agreeable to the taste as he had expected, but it was cold and refreshing.
When the boy had returned with the glasses, the three stood for a moment in silence, meditatively watching the curious scene spread below them. Beyond the bar, Theron could catch now through the trees regularly recurring glimpses of four or five swings in motion. These were nearest him, and clearest to the vision as well, at the instant when they reached their highest forward point. The seats were filled with girls, some of them quite grown young women, and their curving upward sweep through the air was disclosing at its climax a remarkable profusion of white skirts and black stockings. The sight struck him as indecorous in the extreme, and he turned his eyes away. They met Celia\'s; and there was something latent in their brown depths which prompted him, after a brief dalliance of interchanging glances, to look again at the swings.
“That old maid Curran is really too ridiculous, with those white stockings of hers,” remarked Celia; “some friend ought to tell her to dye them.”
“Or pad them,” suggested Father Forbes, with a gay little chuckle. “I daresay the question of swings and ladies\' stockings hardly arises with you, over at the camp-meeting, Mr. Ware?”
Theron laughed aloud at the conceit. “I should say not!” he replied.
“I\'m just dying to see a camp-meeting!” said Celia. “You hear such racy accounts of what goes on at them.”
“Don\'t go, I beg of you!” urged Theron, with doleful emphasis. “Don\'t let\'s even talk about them. I should like to feel this afternoon as if there was no such thing within a thousand miles of me as a camp-meeting. Do you know, all this interests me enormously. It is a revelation to me to see these thousands of good, decent, ordinary people, just frankly enjoying themselves like human beings. I suppose that in this whole huge crowd there isn\'t a single person who will mention the subject of his soul to any other person all day long.”
“I should think the assumption was a safe one,” said the priest, smilingly, “unless,” he added on afterthought, “it be by way of a genial profanity. There used to be some old Clare men who said \'Hell to my soul!\' when they missed at quoits, but I haven\'t heard it for a long time. I daresay they\'re all dead.”
“I shall never forget that death-bed—where I saw you first,” remarked Theron, musingly. “I date from that experience a whole new life. I have been greatly struck lately, in reading our \'Northern Christian Advocate\' to see in the obituary notices of prominent Methodists how over and over again it is recorded that they got religion in their youth through being frightened by some illness of their own, or some epidemic about them. The cholera year of 1832 seems to have made Methodists hand over fist. Even to this day our most successful revivalists, those who work conversions wholesale wherever they go, do it more by frightful pictures of hell-fire surrounding the sinner\'s death-bed than anything else. You could hear the same thing at our camp-meeting tonight, if you were there.”
“There isn\'t so much difference as you think,” said Father Forbes, dispassionately. “Your people keep examining their souls, just as children keep pulling up the bulbs they have planted to see are there any roots yet. Our people are more satisfied to leave their souls alone, once they have been planted, so to speak, by baptism. But fear of hell governs them both, pretty much alike. As I remember saying to you once before, there is really nothing new under the sun. Even the saying isn\'t new. Though there seem to have been the most tremendous changes in races and civilizations and religions, stretching over many thousands of years, yet nothing is in fact altered very much. Where religions are concerned, the human race are still very like savages in a dangerous wood in the dark, telling one another ghost stories around a camp-fire. They have always been like that.”
“What nonsense!” cried Celia. “I have no patience with such gloomy rubbish. The Greeks had a religion full of beauty and happiness and light-heartedness, and they weren\'t frightened of death at all. They made the image of death a beautiful boy, with a torch turned down. Their greatest philosophers openly preached and practised the doctrine of suicide when one was tired of life. Our own early Church was full of these broad and beautiful Greek ideas. You know that yourself! And it was only when your miserable Jeromes and Augustines and Cyrils brought in the abominable meannesses and cruelties of the Jewish Old Testament, and stamped out the sane and lovely Greek elements in the Church, that Christians became the poor, whining, cowardly egotists they are, troubling about their little tin-pot souls, and scaring themselves in their churches by skulls and crossbones.”
“My dear Celia,” interposed the priest, patting her shoulder gently, “we will have no Greek debate today. Mr. Ware has been permitted to taboo camp-meetings, and I claim the privilege to cry off on Greeks. Look at those fellows down there, trampling over one another to get more beer. What have they to do with Athens, or Athens with them? I take it, Mr. Ware,” he went on, with a grave face but a twinkling eye, “that what we are observing here in front of us is symbolical of a great ethical and theological revolution, which in time will modify and control the destiny of the entire American people. You see those young Irishmen there, struggling like pigs at a trough to get their fill of German beer. That signifies a conquest of Teuton over Kelt more important and far-reaching in its results than the landing of Hengist and Horsa. The Kelt has come to grief heretofore—or at least been forced to play second fiddle to other races—because he lacked the right sort of a drink. He has in his blood an excess of impulsive, imaginative, even fantastic qualities. It is much easier for him to make a fool of himself, to begin with, than it is for people of slower wits and more sluggish temperaments. When you add whiskey to that, or that essence of melancholia which in Ireland they call \'porther,\' you get the Kelt at his very weakest and worst. These young men down there are changing all that. They have discovered lager. Already many of them can outdrink the Germans at their own beverage. The lager-drinking Irishman in a few generations will be a new type of humanity—the Kelt at his best. He will dominate America. He will be THE American. And his church—with the Italian element thrown clean out of it, and its Pope living, say, in Baltimore or Georgetown—will be the Church of America.”
“Let us have some more lager at once,” put in Celia. “This revolution can\'t be hurried forward too rapidly.”
Theron could not feel sure how much of the priest\'s discourse was in jest, how much in earnest. “It seems to me,” he said, “that as things are going, it doesn\'t look much as if the America of the future will trouble itself about any kind of a church. The march of science must very soon produce a universal scepticism. It is in the nature of human progress. What all intelligent men recognize today, the masses must surely come to see in time.”
Father Forbes laughed outright this time. “My dear Mr. Ware,” he said, as they touched glasses again, and sipped the fresh beer that had been brought them, “of all our fictions there is none so utterly baseless and empty as this idea that humanity progresses. The savage\'s natural impression is that the world he sees about him was made for him, and that the rest of the universe is subordinated to him and his world, and that all the spirits and demons and gods occupy themselves exclusively with him and his affairs. That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. \'Intelligent men,\' as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they all pull one way. The people as a whole soon get tired of them. They give too much trouble. The most powerful forces in human nature are self-protection and inertia. The middle-aged man has found out that the chief wisdom in life is to bend to the pressures about him, to shut up and do as others do. Even when he thinks he has rid his own mind of superstitions, he sees that he will best enjoy a peaceful life by leaving other peoples\' superstitions alone. That is always the ultimate view of the crowd.”
“But I don\'t see,” observed Theron, “granting that all this is true, how you think the Catholic Church will come out on top. I could understand it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise.”
“The Church is always compromising,” explained the priest, “only it does it so slowly that no one man lives long enough to quite catch it at the trick. No; the great secret of the Catholic Church is that it doesn\'t debate with sceptics. No matter what points you make against it, it is never betrayed into answering back. It simply says these things are sacred mysteries, which you are quite free to accept and be saved, or reject and be damned. There is something intelligible and fine about an attitude like that. When people have grown tired of their absurd and fruitless wrangling over texts and creeds which, humanly speaking, are all barbaric nonsense, they will come back to repose pleasantly under the Catholic roof, in that restful house where things are taken for granted. There the manners are charming, the service excellent, the decoration and upholstery most acceptable to the eye, and the music”—he made a little mock bow here to Celia—“the music at least is divine. There you have nothing to do but be agreeable, and avoid scandal, and observe the convenances. You are no more expected to express doubts about the Immaculate Conception than you are to ask the lady whom you take down to dinner how old she is. Now that is, as I have said, an intelligent and rational church for people to have. As the Irish civilize themselves—you observe them dili............