Modern Protestantism, as he encountered it in the pages of popular newspapers and magazines, at Mrs. Porcher's dinner-table, or in the good Lovegroves' drawing-room, had small attraction for him, since it appeared to advance chiefly by negations stated with rather blatant self-sufficiency and self-conceit. It might tend to the making of respectable municipal councillors; but, in his opinion, it was idle to pretend that it tended to the making of saints--and for the saints, those experts in the divine science, Iglesias confessed a weakness. Of spirituality it showed, to his seeing, as little outward evidence as of philosophy or of art. The phrases of piety might still be upon the lips of its votaries; but the attitude and aspirations engendered by piety were unfortunately dead. Its system of ethics was frankly utilitarian. Its goal, though hidden from the simple by a maze of high-sounding sentiment, was Rationalism pure and simple. Its god was not the creator of the visible universe, of angels and archangels, dominions, principalities, and powers, of incalculable natural and supernatural forces, but a jerky loose-jointed pasteboard divinity, the exclusive possession, since it is the exclusive invention, of the Anglo-Saxon race, through whose gaping mouth any and every self-elected prophet was free to shout, as heaven-descended truth, in the name of progress and liberty, whatever political or social catchword chanced to be the fashion of the hour. Nor did the neo-mystics, whose utterances are also sown broadcast in contemporary literature and who are so lavish with their offers of divine enlightenment, please Iglesias any better. For his mind, thanks to his Latin ancestry, was of the logical order, while a business training and long knowledge of affairs had taught him the value of method, giving him an unalterable reverence for fact, and impressing upon him the existence of law, absolute and immutable, in every department of nature and of human activity--law, to break which is to destroy the sequence of cause and effect, and so procure abortion. Therefore this new school of thinkers--if one can dignify by the name of thinkers persons of so vague and topsy-turvy a mental habit--nourishing themselves upon the windy meat of secular and time-exploded fallacies, upon the temple-sweepings of all the religions, oriental and occidental, old and new, combined with ill-attested marvels of modern physical and psychological experiment, were far from commending themselves to his calm and patient judgment. Such excited persons, as a slight acquaintance with history proves beyond all question, have existed in every age; and, suffering from chronic mental dyspepsia, have ever been liable to mistake the rumblings of internal flatulence for the Witness of the Spirit. In their current pronouncements Iglesias met with a wearisome passion for paradox, and an equally wearisome disposition to hail all eccentricity as genius, all hysteria as inspiration.