in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.«
    Ernest asked timidly for an instance.
    »No, no,« said Pryer. »I will give you no instance, but I will give you a
formula that shall embrace all instances. It is this - that no practise is
entirely vicious which has not been extinguished among the comeliest, most
vigorous, and most cultivated races of mankind in spite of centuries of
endeavour to extirpate it. If a vice in spite of such efforts can still hold its
own among the most polished nations, it must be founded on some immutable truth
or fact in human nature, and must have some compensatory advantage which we
cannot afford altogether to dispense with.«
    »But,« said Ernest timidly, »is not this virtually doing away with all
distinction between right and wrong, and leaving people without any moral guide
whatever?«
    »Not the people,« was the answer; »it must be our care to be guides to
these, for they are and always will be incapable [of] guiding themselves
sufficiently. We should tell them what they must do, and in an ideal state of
things should be able to enforce their doing it; perhaps when we are better
instructed the ideal may come about; nothing will so advance it as greater
knowledge of spiritual pathology on our own parts. For this, three things are
necessary; firstly absolute freedom in experiment for us the clergy; secondly
absolute knowledge of what the laity think and do, and of what thoughts and
actions result in what spiritual conditions, and thirdly a compacter
organisation among ourselves.
    If we are to do any good we must be a closely united body, and must be
sharply divided from the laity. Also we must be free from those ties which a
wife and children involve. I can hardly express the horror with which I am
filled by seeing English priests living in what I can only designate as open
matrimony. It is deplorable. The priest must be absolutely sexless - if not in
practice, yet at any rate in theory, absolutely - and that too by a theory so
universally accepted that none shall venture to dispute it.«
    »But,« said Ernest, »has not the Bible already told people what they ought
and ought not to do, and is it not enough for us to insist on what can be found
here, and let the rest alone?«
    »If you begin with the Bible,« was the rejoinder, »you are three parts gone
on the road to infidelity, and will go the other part before you know where you
are. The