[...]
 He had not a moment to wait. His monk came at a brisk pace out from the lawn and shrubbery; and, coming up to where Myles stood, he placed himself at his side, commenced a smart walk, put his hands in his leathern belt, and said shortly:
“Well?”
 Myles was dreadfully embarrassed, but he managed to stammer out:
 “I was a Fenian in ’67; I put in ten years in Dartmoor Prison. I am as deeply interested in the country now as then, more deeply, more passionately than ever. What I want to know is, are the people hopelessly changed? Under the new materialism, is there hope they will keep the old characteristics of their race?”
 The monk slowed down in his walk, his eyes still fixed on the ground.
 “I have been away from Ireland,” he said, “many years. I have seen but little of it since I returned. How have the people changed?” [336]
 “Every way,” said Myles. The monk’s indifference seemed to exasperate him. “The old spirit is gone — the old, free, open-hearted spirit that made the people so lovable is gone; and, in its place has come in a hard, grinding, material spirit. It is best described by the new gospel: Every man for himself, and God for us all!”
 “But perhaps that old spirit had its faults, too,” said the monk. “Were not the people too generous, too free-hearted, too extravagant?”
“No, no, no!” said Myles, passionately. “The spirit of our race — the spirit of our religion was sacrifice — the giving up something for our neighbour, our country, our God. Now, ‘tis self, self, self, eating into and corroding everything.”
“Yes! that is bad,” said the monk, yet without much interest or emotion.  “ But is it a national misfortune?”
“Undoubtedly!” said Myles. “It is as a national misfortune I deplore it. I am not responsible for the souls of the people. Let them look to it who are! But I have always believed, I might have been wrong, that we are a race apart; that so surely as Jehovah of old selected the Jews as his people — the chosen nation — so we, by God’s design or destiny, stand aloof from the nations around us. Their ways are not our ways; their God is not our God. But we are forgetting ourselves, just as the Israelites forgot themselves under the thunders and lightnings of Sinai. We are going after strange gods. The Philistines are upon us, not to fight us, would to God it were so! but to show us their reeking abominations.”
 It was the monk’s turn now to be surprised. He stopped in his walk, and, turning around, he looked Myles steadily in the face. [337]
“Are you exaggerating, Mr. Cogan?” he said. “When men speak rhetorically, I always distrust them.”
Myles grew red under the reproach; but he rallied.
“You wish me to speak plainer, Father?” he said. “I will. I say, the commercial immorality that we supposed belonged to clever Yankees or perfidious Englishmen is universal in Ireland today; I say the natural affections are extinguished. Every will is now contested; and the dead, with all their sins upon them, are dragged from their graves to show how legally incapable they were. Instead of the old grave dignity and seriousness of the dear old people, I see nothing but vulgarity everywhere. As to patriotism in the old sense, — the love of Ireland, because she is Ireland, and our motherland, — that is as dead as Julius Caesar. The fact is, to use a slang word that has been flung at me lately, we are up-to-date — that is, we have gone after strange gods!”
The monk walked silently on, but more slowly now. Myles was excited and emotional.
At last, at a turn in the walk, the former said:
“The whole thing is novel to me. No one has ever spoken thus before. Perhaps the other Fathers may have heard these things; but I am, just what you say Ireland ought to be, aloof and apart! It may not be well.  We belong to this world as well as to the next!”
“Ha! That’s just what I want to know,” said Myles, anxiously. “It is here the personal question touches me. If all I say is true, and of course I don’t say I am infallible — am I justified in keeping aloof from public life; or am I bound to go down at any cost to my feelings, and help to purify that public life?”
“Well,” said the monk, smiling, “we must establish our premises first.  You heard of Don Quixote?”
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 “Yes!” said Myles. “That’s just it. I don’t want to be tilting at windmills.”
 “Then you must be careful, my dear Mr. Cogan,” said the monk, gently, “not to generalise too much. Probably, you have certain ideals before your mind — do you read much?”
 “Yes!  Of recent years, I have read a great deal.”
 “And great books?”
 “Yes!  The world’s greatest.”
 “And you haven’t mixed much amongst men?”
 “No!  I avoid them as much as I can,” said Myles.
 “Ah! There is the seat of the malady,” said the monk.
 “But,” said Myles, obstinately, “facts are facts, Father. I tell you the country is turned topsy-turvy. What was right thirty years ago is wrong today; and public life is wholly corrupted. Then, all — everyone,” Myles flung out his arms — “is preaching materialism. The idea of Ireland as a great missionary country is scoffed at; the idea of Ireland as a centre of learning and sanctity, our old heritage, is not even named; the whole mind of the country is directed in one way, to be a little England or America — factories, industries, workshops, our harbours filled with ships, our rivers polluted with slime, the atmosphere reeking with soot—”
 “Look! Mr. Cogan! You have been reading Ruskin?”
 “Yes!” said Myles, ashamed of being caught quoting second hand. “He was the most truthful man of his generation.”
 “But — the windmills?” said the monk. “Is England less materialistic today for all his preaching — for all Carlyle’s scolding?  Are not rivers polluted, skies [339] darkened, children playing on banks of slags and cinders, far more than when he thundered against such things? Where’s the use in useless preaching and prophesying?”
 It seemed the final word to Myles. The two men sauntered on in silence.
 “It is at least a comfort to know,” said Myles at length, “that Saul needn’t be amongst the prophets. My work is done.”
 “Yes, possibly!” said Father Cyril. “Nations follow their destiny. But it may comfort you to know that your country can never live long in the sty of materialism. It is with nations as with individuals. Sometimes, an old man comes up here, just at the end of his life to tell us, or rather tell God, that his whole life has been a huge mistake. He set out, just as you say Ireland is setting out, on the grand race for gold. He would be a successful man, that is, he would die worth sixty thousand pounds. He never lost sight of that, night or day. It haunted him at his meals, at his prayers, at Mass, on his journeys. It was the grand objective of existence. He heard sermons denouncing this evil, but they were not for him. It was the priests’ business to say such things on money from time to time, and that was all right. They were ordained for that. But it was his business to make sixty thousand pounds, and to have the newspapers speak of him as a most wealthy and respectable citizen. That too was all right. It was for that he was created. Then, suddenly, he finds the prize in his grasp; but, like the old fairy legend, the gold is but rusty leaves. He is disgusted with his success. He loathes himself. He remembers something about a camel passing through the eye of a needle; and something about Dives and [340] Lazarus, and a great gulf between. Then he comes up here and resolves to disgorge the whole wretched thing, and turn to better things. Now, that is just what I conjecture, from your statements, will happen in Ireland. The nation will go on from prosperity to prosperity. Moral degeneracy must accompany material progress. The nation will grow swollen and inflated — and then, when the climax is reached, and all the dreams of its patriots are realised, it will grow disgusted with itself, for there is one idea that can never leave it. It has haunted the race from St. Patrick downward; it has gone with them in exile; it was their comfort and anchor of hope in persecution — can you guess what it is?”
 Myles was silent, afraid to guess.
 “Tell me,” said the monk, after a pause, “what brought you up here?”
 “To make a short retreat, and a long confession,” said Myles.
 “But, why didn’t you go to Dublin, to Cork, to Limerick?” said the monk. “There are Houses of Retreat in these places; and wiser and better confessors than you will find here.”
 “It was the Mountain,” said Myles, “and the solitude, and that spire, and the chanting of the monks, and their austere lives.”
 “Precisely. That is — the monastic idea — the idea of Bruno and Bernard, and all our saints. But do you know, that our modern silence and austerities are but child’s play, compared with those of the old Irish monks?”
 “So I have heard,” said Myles. “It is hard to believe it.”
 “You may believe it then,” said the monk.  “And [341] do you think that that monastic idea, which is haunting yourself, although you don’t perceive it, is going to be quenched by a few years’ prosperity? Never. The nation will go on; grow fat, like Jeshurun, and kick. And then, it will grow supremely disgusted with itself; it will take its wealth, and build a monastery on every hilltop in Ireland. The island will become another Thebaid — and that will be its final destiny!”
 “God grant it!” said Myles, raising his hat. “But it seems so far away!”
 “A thousand years are but a day in the sight of the Eternal,” said the monk. “Be of good hope. There is an Angel watching over Ireland. “Farewell!”
 The monk stretched out his hand, which Myles grasped. He seemed to wish to detain the monk further; but the latter glided away silently, and Myles felt very much alone.
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