There was great talk that night at dinner among the priests as to the extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with religion through the Church’s unswerving condemnation of it. A man must choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily during the last century. First there had been the organised assault upon the Church in France; and what Catholics had always suspected then became a certainty in the revelations of 1918, when P. Gerome, the Dominican and ex-Mason, had made his disclosures with regard to the Mark-Masons. It had become evident then that Catholics had been right, and that Masonry, in its higher grades at least, had been responsible throughout the world for the strange movement against religion. But he had died in his bed, and the public had been impressed by that fact. Then came the splendid donations in France and Italy--to hospitals, orphanages, and the like; and once more suspicion began to disappear. After all, it seemed--and continued to seem--for seventy years and more that Masonry was nothing more than a vast philanthropical society. Now once more men had their doubts. “I hear that Felsenburgh is a Mason,” observed Monsignor Macintosh, the Cathedral Administrator. “A Grand-Master or something.” “But who is Felsenburgh?” put in a young priest. Monsignor pursed his lips and shook his head. He was one of those humble persons as proud of ignorance as others of knowledge. He boasted that he never read the papers nor any book except those that had received the _imprimatur_; it was a priest’s business, he often remarked, to preserve the faith, not to acquire worldly knowledge. Percy had occasionally rather envied his point of view. “He’s a mystery,” said another priest, Father Blackmore; “but he seems to be causing great excitement. They were selling his ‘Life’ to-day on the Embankment.” “I met an American senator,” put in Percy, “three days ago, who told me that even there they know nothing of him, except his extraordinary eloquence. He only appeared last year, and seems to have carried everything before him by quite unusual methods. He is a great linguist, too. That is why they took him to Irkutsk.” “Well, the Masons---” went on Monsignor. “It is very serious. In the last month four of my penitents have left me because of it.” “Their inclusion of women was their master-stroke,” growled Father Blackmore, helping himself to claret. “It is extraordinary that they hesitated so long about that,” observed Percy. A couple of the others added their evidence. It appeared that they, too, had lost penitents lately through the spread of Masonry. It was rumoured that a Pastoral was a-preparing upstairs on the subject. Monsignor shook his head ominously. “More is wanted than that,” he said.