strengthening stars; the other talked with his head bowed, as if
he were not even worthy to look at them. But no more innocently
clerical conversation could have been heard in any white Italian
cloister or black Spanish cathedral.

The first he heard was the tail of one of Father Brown's
sentences, which ended: "... what they really meant in the Middle
Ages by the heavens being incorruptible."

The taller priest nodded his bowed head and said:

"Ah, yes, these modern infidels appeal to their reason; but
who can look at those millions of worlds and not feel that there
may well be wonderful universes above us where reason is utterly
unreasonable?"

"No," said the other priest; "reason is always reasonable,
even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things. I know
that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just
the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really
supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is
bound by reason."

The other priest raised his austere face to the spangled sky
and said:

"Yet who knows if in that infinite universe--?"

"Only infinite physically," said the little priest, turning
sharply in his seat, "not infinite in the sense of escaping from