"You ought to make a stunning sermon of that, Allan. I think society needs it."
"It does, Aunt Bell, it does! And we are going from bad to worse. I foresee the time in this very age of ours when no woman will continue to be wife to a man except by the dictates of her own lawless and corrupt nature--when a wife will make so-called love her only rule--when she will brazenly disregard the law of God and the word of his only begotten crucified Son, unless she can continue to feel what she calls 'love and respect' for the husband who chose her. We prize liberty, Aunt Bell, but liberty with woman has become license since she lost faith in the word of God that holds her subject to man. We should be thankful that the mother Church still stands firm on that rock--the rock of woman's subjection to man. Our own Church has quibbled, Aunt Bell, but look at the fine consistency of the Church of Rome. As truly as you live, the Catholic Church will one day hold the only women who subject themselves to their husbands in all things because of God's command--regardless of their anarchistic desire to 'please themselves.' There is the only Christian Church left that knows woman is a creature to be ruled with an iron hand--and has the courage to send them to hell for 'pleasing themselves.'"
He glowed in meditation a moment, then, in a burst of confidence, continued:
"This is not to be repeated, Aunt Bell, but I have more than once questioned if I should always allow the Anglo-Catholic Church to modify my true Catholicism. I have talked freely with Father Riley of St. Clements at our weekly ministers' meetings--there's a bright chap for you--and really, Aunt Bell, as to mere universality, the Church of Rome has about the only claim worth considering. Mind you, this is not to be repeated, but I am often so much troubled that I have to fall back on my simple childish faith in the love of the Father earned of him for me by the Son's death on the cross. But what if I err in making my faith too simple? Even now I am almost persuaded that a priest ordained into the Episcopal Church cannot consecrate the elements of the Eucharist in a sacrificial sense. Doubts like these are tragedies to an honest man, Aunt Bell--they try his soul--they bring him each day to the foot of that cross whereon the Son of God suffers his agony in order to ransom our souls from God's wrath with us--and there are times, Aunt Bell, when I find myself gazing longingly, like a little tired child, at the open arms of the mother Church--on whose loving bosom of authority a man may lay all his doubts and be never again troubled in his mind."