“You shall have it at once. Just wait a minute: ‘The criminal narrow-mindedness or perverse malignity which with the idolatries of Baal sullies the pure waters from the rock of Peter!—aha, now we shan’t be long—sullies the pure waters, rock of Peter, there we are—and sets up thereon the golden calf whose name is the Devil or the Absolute—’”

“Have you got the leader?” came a voice from the door of the night editor’s room.

“Laudetur Jesus Christus, my Lord Bishop,” ejaculated Father Jost.

“Have you got the leader?” repeated Bishop Linda, coming hurriedly into the room. “Who was it that wrote this morning’s leader? Heaven forgive me, what a pretty mess you’ve made with it. What idiot wrote it?”

“I . . . I did,” stammered Father Jost, retreating; “Bishop . . . Your Lordship . . . I thought . . .”

“You’ve no right to think,” roared Bishop Linda, his eyeglasses flashing at him eerily. “Here, take the thing”; and crumpling up that morning’s issue of The People’s Friend in his hand, he flung it at Jost’s feet. “I thought! Look at him, he thinks! Why didn’t you telephone? Why didn’t you ask what you were to write? And you, Kostal, how could you put it in the paper? You thought, too, did you? Novotny!”

“Yes, sir,” exclaimed the trembling printer.

“Why did you have that stuff set up in type? Did you think, too?”

“Oh, no, sir,” protested the printer. “I have to set what they send me. . . .”

“Nobody has to do anything but what I want,” Bishop Linda declared decisively. “Jost, sit down and read the drivel you put together this morning. Read it, I tell you.”

“For a long time past,” Father Jost read, in trembling tones, from his own leading article—“for a long time past the public has been disturbed by the knavish imposture . . .”

“What?”

“Knavish imposture, my lord,” groaned Father Jost. “I thought—I—I see now . . .”

“What do you see?”

“That ‘knavish imposture’ is a little too forcible.”

“So I should think. Read on!”

“. . . knavish imposture carried on with the so-called Absolute . . . by means of which the Freemasons, the Jews and other progressives are befooling the world. It has been scientifically demonstrated . . .”

“Look at Jost! Look at him!” cried Bishop Linda. “He has scientifically demonstrated something! Read on.”

“. . . scientifically demonstrated,” stammered the unfortunate Jost, “that the so-called Absolute . . . is just as impious a deception . . . as the tricks performed by mediums. . . .”

“Stop,” said the Bishop with a sudden amiability. “Take down the following leading article: ‘It has been scientifically demonstrated . . .’ Have you got that? . . . ‘demonstrated that I, Father Jost, am a jackass, a dolt and an idiot.’ . . . Have you got that?”

“Yes,” whispered Jost, utterly bewildered. “Please go on, my . . . my lord.”

“Throw that into the waste-paper basket, my son,” said the Bishop, “and open your stupid ears. Have you read to-day’s papers?”

“Yes, my l . . .”