Laura, in her dark corner, had almost disappeared from sight. Molly, the soft, round-faced, spectacled Molly, turned now and then from her friend to her father. She would give Friedland sometimes a gentle restraining touch--her lips shaped themselves, as though she said, "Take care!" And gradually Friedland fell upon things more intimate--the old topics of the relation between Catholicism and the will, Catholicism and conscience. "... I often think we should be the better for some chair of 'The Inner Life,' at an English University!" he said presently, with a smile at Molly.--"What does the ordinary Protestant know of all those treasures of spiritual experience which Catholicism has secreted for centuries? _There_ is the debt of debts that we all owe to the Catholic Church. "Well!--Some day, no doubt, we shall all be able to make a richer use of what she has so abundantly to give.-- "At present what one sees going on in the modern world is a vast transformation of moral ideas, which for the moment holds the field. Beside the older ethical fabric--the fabric that the Church built up out of Greek and Jewish material--a new is rising. We think a hundred things unlawful that a Catholic permits; on the other hand, a hundred prohibitions of the older faith have lost their force. And at the same time, for half our race, the old terrors and eschatologies are no more. We fear evil for quite different reasons; we think of it in quite different ways. And the net result in the best moderns is at once a great elaboration of conscience--and an almost intoxicating sense of freedom.-- "Here, no doubt, it is the _personal abjection_ of Catholicism, that jars upon us most--that divides it deepest from the modern spirit.--Molly!--don't frown!--Abjection is a Catholic word--essentially a Catholic temper. It means the ugliest and the loveliest things. It covers the most various types--from the nauseous hysteria of a Margaret Mary Alacoque, to the exquisite beauty of the _Imitation_.... And it derives its chief force, for good and evil, from the belief in the Mass. There again, how little the Protestant understands what he reviles! In one sense he understands it well enough. Catholicism would have disappeared long ago but for the Mass. Marvellous indestructible belief!--that brings God to Man, that satisfies the deepest emotions of the human heart!-- "What will the religion of the free mind discover to put in its place? Something, it must find. For the hold of Catholicism--or its analogues--upon the guiding forces of Christendom is irretrievably broken. And yet the needs of the soul remain the same....