Monsignor Masterman sat that night at his window, looking out atthe stars and the night and the blotted glimmering gardensbeneath; and it seemed to him as if the Dream deepened every day.Things grew more, not less marvellous, with his appreciation ofthe simplicity of it all.
From three to seven he had sat in one of the seats on the rightof the royal dais, reserved for prelates, almost immediatelyopposite the double-pulpited platform, itself set in the midst ofthe long outer side of the great gallery of Versailles, throughwhich access was to be had to the little old private rooms ofMarie Antoinette, and had listened spell-bound to two of thegreatest wits of France, respectively attacking and defending,with extraordinary subtlety and fire, the claim of the Church toInfallibility. The disputation had been conducted on scholasticlines, all verbal etiquette being carefully observed; again andagain he had heard, first on one side a string of argumentsadduced against the doctrine, then on the other a torrent ofanswers, with the old half-remembered words "Distinguo," "Nego,""Concedo"; and the reasoning on both sides had appeared to himastonishingly brilliant. And all this before two sovereigns:the one keen, vivacious, and appreciative; the other heavy,patient, considerate--two sovereigns, treated, as the elaborateetiquette of the whole affair showed plainly enough, as kingsindeed--men who stood for authority, and the grades and thedifferentiation of functions, as emphatically as the olddemocratic hand-shaking statesmen, dressed like their ownservants, stood for the other complementary principle of theequality of men. For alongside of all this tremendous pomp therewas a very practical recognition of the "People"; since the wholedisputation was conducted in the presence of a crowd drawn, itseemed, from almost every class, who pressed behind the barriers,murmured, laughed gleefully, and now and again broke out intolow thunders of applause, as the Catholic champion drove logichome, or turned aside the infidel shaft.
The very thesis amazed the man, for the absolute necessity of anauthoritative supra-national Church, with supernatural sanctions,seemed assumed as an axiom of thought, not merely by theseCatholics, but by the entire world, Christian and un-Christianalike. More than once the phrase "It is conceded by all men"flashed out, and passed unrebuked, in support of this claim. Theonly point of dispute between reasoning beings seemed to be notas to whether or no the Church must be treated practically asinfallible, but whether dogmatically and actually she were so!
As he sat here now at his window, Father Jervis' words began tocome back with new force. Was it indeed true that the only reasonwhy he found these things strange was that he could not yet quitebring home to his imagination the fact that the world now wasconvincedly Christian as a whole? It began to appear so.
For somewhere in the back of his mind (why, he knew not) therelurked a sort of only half-perceived assumption that theCatholic religion was but one aspect of truth--one point of viewfrom which, with sufficient though not absolute truth, factscould be discerned. He could not understand this; yet there itwas. And he understood, at any rate intellectually, that if hecould once realize that the dogmas of the Church were the dogmasof the universe; and not only that, but that the worldconvincedly realized it too;--why then, the fact that thecivilization of to-day was actually moulded upon it would nolonger bewilder him.