In this mood he became a ready listener to the philosophy of Sir Bernard Vanbrugh; and Sir Bernard expounded his philosophy with some of that proselytizing zeal which marked the last generation of scientists, the Huxleys and the Tyndalls, before Science had laid down her arms at the feet of the great Sphynx, and confessed that she had found no better symbol to replace the old. It would have surprised and alarmed the Duchess if she had been told that the topic most frequently discussed between Sir Bernard Vanbrugh and her son was religion. It would have more than surprised her, it would have found her utterly incredulous, if anyone had told her that Alistair had an intensely religious nature. To her unnaturally stunted mind the word “religion” had only one meaning, and unbelief only one excuse. Alistair had heard the Gospel. In his boyhood he had shown signs of yielding to its influence; it followed, therefore, that his later rejection of it was a deliberate surrender to Satan. Everything in his troubled life that had resulted from his having been violently robbed of his own religion she attributed to his wilful and wicked refusal to embrace hers. In reality, ever since the evangelical tutors employed by the Duchess had succeeded in convincing Alistair that the Catholic creed was false, without convincing him that their own creed was true, he had been groping in a spiritual twilight. The religious instinct, though wounded and defaced, was not dead. He still cherished a more kindly feeling for the Roman Church than for any other, as the one which he had found most indulgent to the sinner, or, at all events, most intelligent and tactful in dealing with himself. To his intellect the language of both creeds sounded incredible. But whereas the teachers of his mother’s confession seemed to share the darkness of their most ignorant disciples, he had found among the priests of Rome some whom he could listen to without impatience. “Our Church,” they declared, “has never claimed that her formulas should be taken literally like mathematical propositions. The Catholic word for ‘creed’ is ‘symbol.’ We offer our dogma, not as the truth itself, but as a symbol of the truth--an allegory, if you will. It is the best statement of the relations between the Unseen and man that the human mind is capable of receiving, and we offer it as nothing more.” This comfortable language would have gone far to satisfy Alistair if he had not observed on the part of his Catholic friends a certain reticence and subservience to authority which alarmed his liberty-loving instincts. The answer to his demand for freedom was the answer of all priesthoods.