ing Her the Mother of God; yet when it comes to practical application, you manage to misunderstand and pervert your own words, and to lapse into the worse than heathen idolatry in which Protestant Christianity is sunk. Thus you miss, nay, you trample upon, your mission, which is to lead the world out of the old idolatry toward the new light.’
‘By throwing Christ and his religion overboard?’ asked the cardinal.
‘No, by interpreting them conformably to the light of nature,’ replied the other. ‘Your Church claims the right of interpretation: be it so. But why does she waste and throw away that right? or rather, why does she use it to league herself with devils and darkness?’
‘How does she so?’ asked the cardinal.
‘My uncle calls all spirits that are not spirits of woman-worship devils of darkness,’ explained Lesbia, with a smile.
‘But what exactly am I to understand by woman-worship?’ inquired the cardinal.
‘Woman-worship,’ answered Lesbia, ‘is at any rate the reverse of the man-worship which the religions of the world hitherto have set up.’
‘Yes,’ assented Mr Bristley, ‘it is that certainly, but it implies a good deal more beside. It implies that carnal affections and even passions are to be impressed into the service of religion, instead of being suppressed as though they were its enemies.’
‘I see,’ said the cardinal; ‘your religion of the future is to be based on hedonism—it is to be a religion of pleasure.’
‘Of pleasure that is in keeping with and belongs to Divine Order, yes. Not otherwise.’
‘Divine Order!’
‘Certainly. Divine Order is the spiritual subjection of the masculine to the feminine in humanity. It is the re-
