"The middle classes are beginning to invest their savings in industrial securities. That is going to make things worse than ever for the poor, since it means organised exploitation, dividends to be paid as well as the profits of private enterprise. It seems to me that men are inventing machinery for making money and letting them get out of hand. A machine that no man can control or use for the purposes of good is the most perilous engine of destruction."
"A machine," thought Bennett, and at once there came to his mind the streets surrounding his office where all day long there was the thud of machinery and thousands of men and women being swallowed up in the morning by great black ugly buildings, and spewed out again in the evening, all, he supposed, as weary and listless as he felt himself on every evening except Saturday.
"Isn't that," said Serge, "isn't that what has happened with the Church? . . . You don't mind my discussing it in that way? . . . Hasn't it become a machine which takes everything from men and gives them nothing? I fancy my father's Church doesn't meddle much, or, at any rate, effectually, with politics, but yours is always struggling after the temporal power which it has lost."
"That is because we believe that the Church and State should be one."
"I agree. And so they would be if the Church were really a Church, and the State were really a State. I have never been to your church, but I know that my father's is only an imitation, a fairly good imitation and quite attractive, but it has nothing at all to do with religion as I understand it."
"I take it to mean the profoundest instinct in a human being, that instinct of life which embraces and should direct all the rest."
Bennett did not hear Father Soledano's reply. The dialogue had been to him like the murmuring of mysterious voices in a dream, bearing no relation to his own actual experience. His own religion was so axiomatic that the possibility of criticism, outside crude condemnation, to which he was hardened and accustomed, had never occurred to him, and yet, now that it had happened, it was as something remote, impious, but menacing and disturbing. That Father Soledano should lend himself to such talk perturbed him not at all, for he had been brought up to believe that anything was possible for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He was conscious of resentment, and told himself that it was because these things were being said in Mr. Folyat's house. He was hurt, and childishly he wished to hand on the pain to some one. He waited until Father Soledano's voice had died down, and then he said, taking no account of his words: