The waving of their wings supplies
A fan to cool their extacies!
But redness shines with better grace,
Delphina, on thy beauteous face,
Where modesty sits revelling—
Arrayed in purple, like a king,” &c.
What think you of this, fathers? Does this preference of the blushes of Delphina to the ardor of those spirits, which is neither more nor less than the ardor of divine love, and this simile of the fan applied to their mysterious wings, strike you as being very Christian-like in the lips which consecrate the adorable body of Jesus Christ? I am quite aware that he speaks only in the character of a gallant, and to raise a smile; but this is precisely what is called laughing at things holy. And is it not certain, that, were he to get full justice, he could not save himself from incurring a censure? although, to shield himself from this, he pleads an excuse which is hardly less censurable than the offence, “that the Sorbonne has no jurisdiction over Parnassus, and that the errors of that land are subject neither to censure nor the Inquisition;”—as if one could act the blasphemer and profane fellow only in prose! There is another passage, however, in the preface, where even this excuse fails him, when he says, “that the water of the river, on whose banks he composes his verses, is so apt to make poets, that, though it were converted into holy water, it would not chase away the demon of poesy.” To match this, I may add the following flight of your Father Garasse, in his “Summary of the Capital Truths in Religion,” where, speaking of the sacred mystery of the incarnation, he mixes up blasphemy and heresy in this fashion: “The human personality was grafted, as it were, or set on horseback, upon the personality of the Word!”[[235]] And omitting many others, I might mention another passage from the same author, who, speaking on the subject of the name of Jesus, ordinarily written thus,
✝
I. H. S.
observes that “some have taken away the cross from the top of it, leaving the characters barely thus, I. H. S.—which,” says he, “is a stripped Jesus!”