For he began to wonder whether there were not yet further discoveries which he would have to make--workings out and illustrations of the principles he had begun to perceive.

How, for example, he began to ask himself, would the Church deal with those who did not recognize her claims--those solitary individuals or groups here and there who, he knew, still clung pathetically to the old dreams of the beginning of the century--to the phantom of independent thought and the intoxicating nightmare of democratic government?
It was certain now that these things were dreams--that it was ludicrously absurd to imagine that a man could profitably detach himself from Revelation and the stream of tradition and development that flowed from it; that it was ridiculous to turn creation upside-down and to attempt to govern the educated few by the uneducated many.

Yet people did occasionally hold impossible and absurd theories.

.

.