“It's unfair,” Mr. Bridges protested, “to ask a prejudiced pagan like me to pronounce judgment on an honest parson who is labouring according to his lights.” “Go on, George. You shan't get out of it that way.” “Well,” said George, “the trouble is, from the theological point of view, that your parson is preaching what Auguste Sabatier would call a diminished and mitigated orthodoxy.” “Great heavens!” cried Phil. “What's that?” “It's neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor good red herring,” the professor declared. “If Mr. Hodder were cornered he couldn't maintain that he, as a priest, has full power to forgive sins, and yet he won't assert that he hasn't. The mediaeval conception of the Church, before Luther's day, was consistent, at any rate, if you once grant the premises on which it was based.” “What premises?” “That the Almighty had given it a charter, like an insurance company, of a monopoly of salvation on this portion of the Universe, and agreed to keep his hands off. Under this conception, the sale of indulgences, masses for the soul, and temporal power are perfectly logical--inevitable. Kings and princes derive their governments from the Church. But if we once begin to doubt the validity of this charter, as the Reformers did, the whole system flies to pieces, like sticking a pin into a soap bubble. “That is the reason why--to change the figure--the so-called Protestant world has been gradually sliding down hill ever since the Reformation. The great majority of men are not willing to turn good, to renounce the material and sensual rewards under their hands without some definite and concrete guaranty that, if they do so, they are going, to be rewarded hereafter. They demand some sort of infallibility. And when we let go of the infallibility of the Church, we began to slide toward what looked like a bottomless pit, and we clutched at the infallibility of the Bible. And now that has begun to roll. “What I mean by a mitigated orthodoxy is this: I am far from accusing Mr. Hodder of insincerity, but he preaches as if every word of the Bible were literally true, and had been dictated by God to the men who held the pen, as if he, as a priest, held some supernatural power that could definitely be traced, through what is known as the Apostolic Succession, back to Peter.” “Do you mean to say, George,” asked Mrs. Waring, with a note of pain in her voice, “that the Apostolic Succession cannot be historically proved?” “My dear mother,” said George, “I hope you will hold me innocent of beginning this discussion. As a harmless professor of history in our renowned University (of which we think so much that we do not send our sons to it) I have been compelled by the children whom you have brought up to sit in judgment on the theology of your rector.” “They will leave us nothing!” she sighed. “Nothing, perhaps, that was invented by man to appeal to man's superstition and weakness. Of the remainder--who can say?”