XLII.
MEMORY LOOKING BACK.
"Man can do nothing against Destiny. We go, time flies, and that which must arrive, arrives."
LÉON CLADEL (L'Homme de la Croix-aux-Baufs).
Marcel was one of those energetic natures who believe that struggle is one of the conditions of life. He had valiantly accepted the task which was incumbent upon him.
But there are hours of discouragement and exhaustion, in which the boldest and the strongest succumb, and he had reached one of those hours.
And then, it is so difficult to struggle without ceasing, especially when we catch no glimpse of calmer days. Weariness quickly comes and we sink down on the road.
Then a friendly hand should be stretched towards us, should lift us up and say to us "Courage." But Marcel could not lean on any friendly hand.
He had no one to whom he could confide his struggles, his vexations, and the apprehension of his coming weaknesses.
Although his life as priest had been spotless up to then, his brethren held aloof from him, for there was a bad mark against him at the Bishop's Palace. It had been attached at the commencement of his career. He was one of those catechumens on whom from the very first the most brilliant hopes are founded. Knowledge, intelligence, respectful obedience, appearance of piety, sympathetic face, everything was present in him.
The Bishop, a frivolous old man, a great lover of little girls, who combined the sinecure of his bishopric with that of almoner to a second-hand empress, whose name will remain celebrated in the annals of devout gallantry or of gallant devotion, the Bishop, a worthy pastor for such a sheep, passed the greater portion of his time in the intrigues of petticoats and sacristies, and left to the young secretary the care of matters spiritual.
It was he who, like Gil-Blas, composed the mandates and sometimes the sermons of Monseigneur.
This confidence did not fail to arouse secret storms in the episcopal guest-chamber.
A Grand-Vicar, jealous of the influence which the young Abbé was assuming over his master's mind, had resolved upon his dismissal and fall.
With a church-man's tortuous diplomacy, he pried into the young man's heart, as yet fresh and inexperienced.
He insinuated himself into the most hidden recesses of his conscience, seized, so to say, in their flight the timid fleeting transports of his thought, of his vigorous imagination, and soon discovered with secret satisfaction that he was straying from the ancient path of orthodoxy.
Marcel, indeed, belonged to that younger generation of the clergy which believes that everything which alienates the Church from new ideas, brings it nearer to its ruin. And the day when the foolish Pius IX presumed to proclaim and define, to the great joy of free-thinkers and the enemies of Catholicism, the ridiculous dogma of the Immaculate Conception in the presence of two hundred dumb complaisant prelates, on that day he experienced profound grief. According to his ideas this was the severest blow which had been inflicted on the foundations of the Church for centuries.
He had studied theology deeply, but he had not confined himself to the letter; he believed he saw something beyond.
—The letter killeth, he said, the spirit giveth life.
—The spirit giveth life when it is wholesome and pure, the Grand-Vicar answered him with a smile, but is it healthy in a young man who believes himself to be wiser than his elders?
Marcel then without mistrust and urged by questions, developed his theories. He believed in the absolute equality of men before God, in the transmutation of souls: and the resurrection of the flesh seemed to him the utmost absurdity. He quite thought that there were future rewards and penalties, but he had too much faith in the goodness of God to suppose that the expiation could be eternal. He allied himself in that to the Universalists, who were, he said, the most reasonable sect of American Protestantism.
—Reasonable! reasonable! repeated the Grand-Vicar scoffingly; in truth, my poor friend, you make me doubt your reason. Can there be anything reasonable in the turpitude of heresy?
Then he hurried to find the Bishop:
—I have emptied our young man's bag, he said to him. Do you know,
Monseigneur, what there was at the bottom?
—Oh, oh. Has he been inclined to debauchery? He is so young.
—Would to heaven it were only that, Monseigneur. But it is a hundred times worse.
—What do you tell me? Must I fear then for all my little sheep? We must look after him then.
—I repeat, Monseigneur, that that would be nothing…. It is the abomination of abomination, a whole world of turpitude, heresies in embryo.
—Heresies! Oh, oh! That is serious.
—Heresies which would make the cursed shades of John Huss, Wickliffe,
Luther and Calvin himself tremble, if they appeared again.
—What do you say?
—I tell you, Monseigneur, that you have warmed a viper in your bosom.
—Ah, well, I will drive out this wicked viper.
The Bishop, who kept two nieces in the episcopal seraglio, would willingly have pardoned his secretary if he had been accused of immorality, but he could not carry his condescension so far as heresy. He wanted, however, to assure himself personally, and as Marcel was incapable of lying, he quickly recognized the sad reality.
The young Abbé was severely punished. He was compelled to make an apology, to retract his horrible ideas, to stifle the germ of these infant monstrosities; then he was condemned to spend six months in one of those ecclesiastical prisons called houses of retreat, where the guilty priest is exposed to every torment and every vexation.
He was definitely marked and classed as a dangerous individual.
His enemy, the Grand-Vicar, pursued him with his indefatigable hatred, so far that from disgrace to disgrace he had reached the cure of Althausen.