Moonchild

12 Chapter OF BROTHER ONOFRIO, HIS STOUTNESS AND VALIANCE; AND OF THE MISADVENTURES THAT CAME THEREBY TO THE BLACK LODGE THE ecclesiastic is a definite type of man. The Italian priest has changed his character in three thousand years as little as he has his costume. Brother Onofrio's father happened to be a free-thinking Anti-clerical, a pillar of Masonry; otherwise, his son would assuredly have been a bishop. The type is perfectly pagan, whatever the creed; it is robust and subtle, spiritual and sensual, adroit in manipulation of inferiors and superiors alike. It has the courage which vigorous health and the consciousness of its own validity combine to give; and where courage will not serve the turn, astuteness deftly takes its place. A stupid pedant like Edwin Arthwait is the very feeblest opponent for such a man. Brother Onofrio, while successfully practising magick, was quite ready at a moment's notice to throw the whole theory overboard with a horse laugh — and at the same time to reckon his action in so doing a branch of magick also. It was the beginning of the duplicate brain-development which Cyril Grey had cultivated to so high a point of perfection. But Arthwait was in the fetters of his own egoism; while he pronounced himself father and grandfather [157] of all spiritual science, in language that would have seemed stilted and archaic to Henry James, or Osric, and presumptuous in the mouth of an archangel, he was the bondslave of utterly insignificant writers, fakers of magical "grimoires " of the fourteenth century, hawkers of spells and conjurations to a benighted peasantry who wished to bewitch cows or to prevent their neighbours from catching fish. Arthwait had published a book to show the folly of such works, but in practice they were