"Really, my dear fellow, I beg your pardon, I forgot that I was
speaking to a clergyman."

"Pray don't beg my pardon on that ground. If what you say be right,
a clergyman above all others ought to hear it; and if it be wrong,
and a symptom of spiritual disease, he ought to hear it all the
more. But I cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, till I know
what you mean by religion; for there is a great deal of very truly
confounded and confounding religion abroad in the world just now, as
there has been in all ages; and perhaps you may be alluding to
that."

Templeton sat silent for a few minutes, playing with the tackle in
his fly-book, and then murmured to himself the well-known lines of
Lucretius:


"Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret
In terris oppressa gravi sub Relligione
Quae caput a coeli regionibus ostendebat,
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans.


There!-blasphemous reprobate fellow, am I not?"

"On the contrary," I said, "I think that in the sense in which
Lucretius intended that the lines should be taken, they contain a
great deal of truth. He had seen the basest and foullest crimes
spring from that which he calls Relligio, and he had a full right to