"The Divine Will," said Max, "gave me my body and my reasoning power. You must not ask me to forfeit them. I agree with that old collegiate (a doctor of divinity like myself) to whom one of more austere piety had declared 'abject submission' the only possible attitude of the creature toward his Creator. 'No, no!' protested the Doctor, with outraged dignity, 'deference, but not--not abject submission!' Deference is all a man can honestly promise so long as reason remains to him; abject submission is fit only for lunatic asylums." "And yet," she retorted, "abject submission to antecedents is all that science can infer when once it starts to investigate the springs of action." "That is not to deny reason; that only conditions it. I wanted you to accuse me of blasphemy; but as you do not give me my legitimate openings I have to make them for myself. To me the abrogation of reason, on any pretense, is the most rooted blasphemy of which the mind of man is capable. Some modern Romanist penned once a hymn which had in it these or like words for its refrain-- 'And black is white, And wrong is right, If it be Thy sweet Will.' That, to my mind, is a blasphemous utterance, for it juggles with the fundamentals of all morality. The person who adopts that attitude as an act of surrender to earthly love is a sensualist. It is a form of sensualism rampant in women; and men encourage it by bestowing upon it the names of womanly virtues. To adopt a similar attitude in spiritual matters seems to me sensualism none the less. And what a hot-bed for that sort of sensualism the Church has always been and still is!" His ugly talk roused her spirit of resistance. "How can it be sensual," she protested, "when it results in self-denial and self-sacrifice?" "Self-sacrifice," he replied, "may be merely sensualism in its intensest form; it is peculiarly a woman's temptation; the scientific name for it (since you throw science at my head) is 'negative egoism.' You yourself are quite capable of it; for you cannot get rid of the results of your training all in a day." She did not flinch from his attack. "What do you know of my training?" she asked. "I know this: here are you the superior of any Bishop on the bench now preparing to play injured martyr at the loss of his political privileges; and what position of authority and influence has your Church to offer you--you and the thousands like you whose practical humanity alone has made its antiquated forms still possible? Yes, you are its life-preservers, and they tuck you away into subordinate positions and back slums where nobody hears of you. And you have been trained to think that it is right!" "The training was all my own," she said. "I tucked myself." "Wastefully, under parental conditions--you yourself have owned it." "There is always more work than one can do."