“I see,” said her companion, gravely; “you felt that the study of the work of men like most of our poets, whose religious positions were vague and not formulated according to our creeds, was likely to act unfavourably upon your spiritual life and experience.”
“Yes. To divide my heart, to dim my sense of a one, single aim in life.”
“And that aim?”
“To serve God directly in every thought and word. That, and to try to save the souls of the lost.”
Professor Ward had no key to the profound sadness with which Anna spoke, but he watched her face with earnest interest. She spoke with the unconsciousness of absolute sincerity. He was reflecting, however, on how much easier life might be if one could sustain, undisturbed, such bare simplicity of conception of human relations.
“And so,” he said slowly, “you were going to prune away every instinct, every faculty of your nature which did not serve the immediate purpose of furthering what men call sometimes ‘the cause of religion,’ and know and feel and be one thing only?”
Anna bent her head in assent.
“That is precisely what men and women do who seek monastic life.”
Anna looked up at Professor Ward in quick surprise and instinctive protest.
“Yes,” he said, with emphasis, “it was just as noble and just as cowardly, just as weak and just as strong, as the impulses which make monks and nuns. It is what people do who are afraid of life, who do not dare to encounter the whole of it, who have not reached the highest faith in either God or man.”