"Doyle, Arthur Conan - Stark Munro Letters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Arthur Conan)

alone with a hale, white-haired, old Roman Catholic
priest, who had sat quietly reading his office in the
corner. We fell into the most intimate talk, which
lasted all the way to Avonmouth--indeed, so interested
was I that I very nearly passed through the place without
knowing it. Father Logan (for that was his name) seemed
to me to be a beautiful type of what a priest should be--
self-sacrificing and pure-minded, with a kind of simple
cunning about him, and a deal of innocent fun. He had
the defects as well as the virtues of his class, for he
was absolutely reactionary in his views. We discussed
religion with fervour, and his theology was somewhere
about the Early Pliocene. He might have chattered the
matter over with a priest of Charlemagne's Court, and
they would have shaken hands after every sentence. He
would acknowledge this and claim it as a merit. It
was consistency in his eyes. If our astronomers and
inventors and law-givers had been equally consistent
where would modern civilisation be? Is religion the only
domain of thought which is non-progressive, and to be
referred for ever to a standard set two thousand years
ago? Can they not see that as the human brain evolves it
must take a wider outlook? A half-formed brain makes a
half-formed God, and who shall say that our brains are
even half-formed yet? The truly inspired priest is the
man or woman with the big brain. It is not the shaven
patch on the outside, but it is the sixty ounces within
which is the real mark of election.

You know that you are turning up your nose at me,
Bertie. I can see you do it. But I'll come off the thin
ice, and you shall have nothing but facts now. I'm
afraid that I should never do for a story-teller, for the
first stray character that comes along puts his arm in
mine and walks me off, with my poor story straggling away
to nothing behind me.

Well, then, it was night when we reached Avonmouth,
and as I popped my head out of the carriage window, the
first thing that my eyes rested upon was old
Cullingworth, standing in, the circle of light under a
gas-lamp. His frock coat was flying open, his waistcoat
unbuttoned at the top, and his hat (a top hat this time)
jammed on the back of his head, with his bristling hair
spurting out in front of it. In every way, save that he
wore a collar, he was the same Cullingworth as ever. He
gave a roar of recognition when he saw me, bustled me out
of my carriage, seized my carpet bag, or grip-sack as you
used to call it, and a minute later we were striding
along together through the streets.