“I had no idea that you sympathized with the Legitimists,” she observed. The Vicar smiled indulgently. “This bazaar, I suppose you mean? It is more Father Grimes’s doing than mine. I hold entirely aloof from politics.” “But you have lent your schoolroom.” Dr. Coles frowned. “My schoolroom, as you call it, is a public building,” he said, with a touch of anger. “I find I am expected to lend it for the purposes of political meetings, even to the party which almost openly aims at Disestablishment. I sometimes wonder I don’t receive an application to lend it for an infidel lecture.” The Duchess was impressed. Dr. Coles had struck the one note which brought them into perfect accord, in his reference to infidelity. In the view of the Duchess this was the one thing worse than Popery. Her religious scale was made up of five degrees. At the very bottom came Infidelity, in which term she was disposed to include the Unitarian denomination and those divines of her own Church whose Hebrew studies had led them to take different views as to the authorship of the Old Testament books from those at one time prevalent. The second head, Popery, covered practically the whole Christian Church during the ages between the death of Paul and the conversion of Martin Luther, and two-thirds of existing Christendom. The third division, under the word Idolatry, embraced the religions of the rest of mankind, including the stern monotheists of Islam. The Jews formed a class apart; the Duchess was too good a Conservative to blame that ancient race severely for their stubbornness in resisting even a Divine reform; she regarded them as a species of embryo Christians, whose development had been arrested in the caterpillar stage. Her fifth division, Protestantism, applied to the sects dating from the Lutheran revolt, and to stray heretics of the past, such as the Socialist Lollards and the freethinking Albigeois, who possessed the merit of having been persecuted by Rome. Among these, of course, she distinguished between the converted Christian and the much larger class of sinners for whom she wished to take for granted a death-bed repentance.