Three Cheers For The Paraclete by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online Page A

all, in any real sense. But I’m getting my thesis together for publication. For once, I couldn’t afford the time or the split skull.’
    ‘Of course not.’
    They exchanged names, Maurice for James. Maitland was suddenly very willing that over the rubble of scholarship on his table an improbable friendship should grow. Only now that it began to lift did Maitland feel the full oppression of the Grete-and-Brendan business, of the Manichean quality of Nolan’s injunctions on hygiene at that time, of the veiled accusation before the accident that he peddled oral contraceptives in the confessional, of the accusation afterwards that he was spiritual kin to Jonah.
    Before friendship formed, however, and while there was still time to deal unscrupulously with the little canon lawyer, Maitland got in the question, ‘I wonder could you tell me how long before the Sunday do you have to submit the text of a cathedral sermon to Dr Nolan?’
    And like a practised canon lawyer to whom time-limits are the expected thing, Egan speculated with some assurance, and the lips trembled on a number – but did not say it. He frowned.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘I thought cathedral sermons had to be scrutinized by the monsignor.’
    ‘No,’ Egan said, putting an explanatory hand on the table. ‘It would be a sad day when they weren’t able to trust the preaching of a member of this staff. Even one under house arrest.’
    Maitland saw that until then his guest had kept both hands clasped on the left hip and that now, as a pernicious silence grew, they fled back there defenceless as sheep. This disposed Maitland to suspect a number of things, among them that Egan might sometimes find his quarters immaculate with the same dismay as Maitland found his own to be a shambles.
    Egan chirped suddenly, ‘Speaking of censorship, James, have you ever heard of a book called The Meanings of God ? Its author is a man called Quinlan, a Catholic priest, according to the publishers.’
    ‘You are the complete canon lawyer,’ Maitland said after a silence. He stood again. ‘ The Meanings of God . So they’ve found out about that?’
    He could remember meeting a cerebral young English publisher nearly three years before in Ghent. As people do to friendly publishers, he had shown the man a very ragged manuscript. He had said, ‘It’s a history of the idea of God since the eighteenth century. If Tillich speaks of a God beyond God, this is a history of the God who is somewhat this side of the unknown God. It is a history of the God of the institutions, pulpits, political parties and wreath-laying generals. It is a history of the abuse of the notion of God and of its place in the motives of modern man.’ He could remember the publisher arriving in Louvain by Volkswagen and running up the stairs to his, Maitland’s room, shouting praise and royalty percentages. He had wanted to publish under a pseudonym, using his mother’s maiden name. His motive was stage-fright, not fear of a dimly remembered Church law by which priests were meant to submit whatever they published to censorship by their superiors. Just the same, he thought that the spirit of the law would be satisfied by a pseudonym. Apart from that, his was intended to be a historical study, even if it did not permit the same type of ordered treatment as would a life of Garibaldi or Lola Montez. If there was a difference between what God was and what man, at this or that stage, thought God was, then this was a work of history and not of theology.
    He published it. It went into two editions. Historians were diverted by it although, as they all said, it was not, could not hope to be, definitive. Most theologians enjoyed it. The young publisher had not been able to afford a third edition, but he had sold it into paperbacks, and Maitland had received the cheque for this sale a month after coming to the House of Studies.
    Now he walked without anger to the balcony door. Like every writer who ever