Two gentleman who were in the lavatory at the time tried to lift him up: but he was quite helpless. He lay curled up at the foot of the stairs down which he had fallen…. His hat had rolled a few yards away and his clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards.
Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise intersected the arc of his friend’s decline but Mr Kernan’s decline was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character.
She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by the kitchen but, if she was put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.
--Yes, that’s it, said Mr Cunningham, Jack and I and M’Coy here – we’re all going to wash the pot.
Every other order of the Church has to be reformed at some time or other but the Jesuit Order was never once reformed. It never fell away.
--But, of course, said Mr Cunningham quietly and effectively, our religion is the religion, the old, original faith.
--Allow me, said Mr Cunningham positively, it was Lux upon Lux. And Pius IX. his predecessor’s motto was Crux upon Crux that is, Cross upon Cross – to show the difference between their two pontificates.
--No, damn it all, said Mr Kernan sensibly, I draw the line there. I’ll do the job right enough. I’ll do the retreat business and confession, and…all that business. But…no candles! No, damn it all, I bar the candles!
If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if they tallied accurately with conscience.
--Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set right my accounts.
