You cannot have known many Catholics.
They are not untrue."
"O yes, I have known numbers," Ideala answered; "I speak from
experience. Yet it always seems to me that the Roman Catholic religion
is good for individuals. There is pleasure in it, and help and comfort
for them. But then it is death to the progress of nations, and the
question is: Would an individual be justified in adding a unit more for
his own benefit to a system which would ruin his country? I think not."
Here, however, she stopped, seeing at last that something was wrong.
"What dreadful mistake did I make this evening?" she asked me
afterwards. "Mrs. Jervois declared she wasn't a Catholic."
"But her husband is," I answered; "and he heard every word."
Ideala groaned.
Not long afterwards Mrs. Jervois wrote and told us she had entered the
Catholic Church. "I had, in fact, been received before I went to you,"
she confessed.
"There!" Ideala exclaimed. "It is just what I said. A want of common
honesty is a part of the religion; and you see she had begun to
practise it while she was here."
"What an eternal lie it is they preach when they tell us life is not
worth having," she said to me once, speaking of preachers generally.
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