“Mamma, dear, we are all going to God, and some like the Roman Catholic way. My own forefathers for eight hundred years did so. They could not all be wrong—abbotts and priors and priests and nuns, all of them. They could not all be wrong.”
“Nor right.”
“Well none of us can deny that while the Huddlestons were of the old profession, they were famous and prosperous. They 384 turned Protestant when that little German body that couldn’t speak a word of English, came to govern us. The idea!”
“Are you going to turn Catholic after all?”
“I am going to be just what my Bible makes me.”
For I may as well state here that Lilly, though born in the very citadel of Calvinism, was a natural Catholic. She loved its ritual, and frequently went to confession. At one time it took all my pleading and influence, and all Dr. Tyng’s eloquence to keep her out of a convent, and I had a year or two of constant fear and watchfulness. This was the year we lived on Lexington Avenue opposite the Dominican Church. There was at that time a priest there called Father McKenna, a holy man entirely separate from the world, night and day either before the altar, or among the most miserable of the living and the dying; and I think he was her inspiration.
For long centuries Lilly’s ancestors had been priests in the old profession, and Furness Abbey is full of their memorial stones as Abbotts of that rich and powerful brotherhood. Catholicism was in her heart and her blood, and she was animated by all the passionate missionary spirit of the old faith. I had much suffering and long months of miserable anxiety on this subject, and doubtless Lilly was just as unhappy, but this is one of those domestic tragedies not for the public ear, and I do not know how I came to write so much about it.
I will, however, let it stand, for I would not be astonished if she yet went back to the Roman Church. Her soul has evidently belonged to it in all its incarnations, and I know that whenever she is in trouble or perplexity she goes to a Catholic priest for advice. One day I asked her, “Why?”
“Because,” she answered, “they never snub or ask me ‘whose daughter art thou.’ They know immediately that I am a Protestant, but they never turn me away. Kindly, and without prejudice they give me the best advice. It never comes out wrong.”
“But why not go to God for advice?”