“Ah, the good of our souls!”
“And there are other reasons which can not be freely spoken of here.”
“You mean the restriction and prohibition of sexual knowledge between relatives. That is very well. But let us return to what concerns us properly: the good of my soul, and the spiritual well-being of the community,––what becomes of these, when I pay the prescribed alms and obtain the sanction of the Bishop?”
“No harm then can come to them––they’ll be secure.”
“Secure, you say? Are they not hazarded, sold by your Church for five hundred piasters? If my marriage to my cousin be wrong, unlawful, your Bishop in sanctioning same is guilty of perpetuating this wrong, this unlawfulness, is he not?”
“But what the Church binds only the Church can loosen.”
“And what is the use of binding, O Reverend 170 Father, when a little sum of money can loosen anything you bind? It seems to me that these prohibitions of the Church are only made for the purpose of collecting alms. In other words, you bind for the sake of loosening, when a good bait is on the hook, do you not? Pardon, O my Reverend Father, pardon. I can not, to save my soul and yours, reconcile these contradictions. For if Mother Church be certain that my marriage to my cousin is contrary to the Law of God, is destructive of my spiritual well-being, then let her by all means prohibit it. Let her restrain me, compel me to obey. Ay, and the police ought to interfere in case of disobedience. In her behalf, in my behalf, in the behalf of my cousin’s soul and mine, the police ought to do the will of God, if the Church knows what it is, and is certain and honest about it. Compel me to stop, I conjure you, if you know I am going in the way of damnation. O my Father, what sort of a mother is she who would sell two of her children to the devil for a few hundred piasters? No, billah! no. What is unlawful by virtue of the Divine Law the wealth of all the Trust-Kings of America can not make lawful. And what is so by virtue of your Canon Law concerns not me. You may angle, you and your Church, as long as you please in the murky, muddy waters of Bind-and-Loosen, I have nothing to do with you.”...
But the priests, O Khalid, have yet a little to do with you. Such arguments about the Divine Law and the Canon Law, about alms and spiritual beggars, 171 might cut the Gordian knot with your uncle, but––and whether it be good or bad English, we say it––they cut no ice with the Church. Yes, Mother Church, under whose wings you and your cousin were born and bred, and under whose wings you and your cousin would be married, can not take off for the sweet sake of your black eyes the ruffles and flounces of twenty centuries. Think well on it, you who have so extravagantly and not unwisely delivered yourself on flounces and ruffles. But to think, when in love, were, indeed, disastrous. O Love, Love, what Camels of wisdom thou canst force to pass through the needle’s eye! What miracles divine are thine! Khalid himself says that to be truly, deeply, piously in love, one must needs hate himself. How true, how inexorably true! For would he be always inviting trouble and courting affliction, would he be always bucking against the dead wall of a Democracy or a Church, if he did not sincerely hate himself––if he were not religiously, fanatically in love––in love with Najma, if not with Truth?
Now, on the following Sunday, instead of publishing the intended marriage of Khalid and Najma, the parish priest places a ban upon it. And in this, ye people of Baalbek, is food enough for tattle, and cause enough for persecution. Potent are the ruffles of the Church! But why, we can almost hear the anxious Reader asking, if the camels are ready, why the deuce don’t they get on and get them gone? But did we not say once that Khalid is slow, even slower than the law itself? Nevertheless, if this were a 172 Novel, an elopement would be in order, but we must repeat, it is not. We are faithful transcribers of the truth as we find it set down in Shakib’s Histoire Intime.