“My good friends,” he went on earnestly, “like all priests and preachers, I have been but a helpless spectator of humanity’s troubles. I have longed and prayed to know how to do the works which Jesus is said to have done; yet, at the sick-bed or the couch of death, what could I do––I, to whom the apostolic virtue is supposed to have descended in the long line of succession? I could anoint with holy oil. I could make signs, and pray. I could give promises of remitted sins––though I knew I spoke not truth. I could comfort by voicing the insipid views of our orthodox heaven. And yet I know that what I gave was but mental nostrums, narcotics, to stupify until death might end the suffering. Is that serving Christ? Is that Christianity? Alas, no!”
“And if you were a good orthodox priest,” interposed Haynerd, “you would refuse burial to dissenters, and bar from your communion table all who were not of your faith, eh?”
“Yes,” sadly. “I would have to, were I consistent; for Catholicism is the only true faith, founded upon the revealed word of God, you know.” He smiled pathetically as he looked around at the little group.
“Now,” he continued, “you, Mr. Haynerd, are a man of the world. You are not in sympathy with the Church. You are an infidel, an unbeliever. And therefore are you ‘anathema,’ you know.” He laughed as he went on. “But you can not 13 deny that at times you think very seriously. And, I may go farther: you long, intensely, for something that the world does not offer. Now, what is it but truth that you are seeking?”
“I want to know,” answered Haynerd quickly. “I want to be shown. I am fond of exhibitions of sleight-of-hand and jugglery. But the priestly thaumaturgy that claims to transform a biscuit into the flesh of a man dead some two thousand years, and a bit of grape juice into his blood, irritates me inexpressibly! And so does the jugglery by which your Protestant fellows, Hitt, attempt to reconcile their opposite beliefs. Why, what difference can it possibly make to the Almighty whether we miserable little beings down here are baptised with water, milk, or kerosene, or whether we are immersed, sprinkled, or well soused? Good heavens! for nearly twenty centuries you have been wandering among the non-essentials. Isn’t it time to get down to business, and instead of burning at the stake every one who differs with you, try conscientiously to put into practice a few of the simple moral precepts, such as the Golden Rule, and loving one’s neighbor as one’s self?”
“There,” commented Father Waite, “you have a bit of the world’s opinion of the Church! Can we say that the censure is not just? Would not Christ himself to-day speak even more scathingly to those who advocate a system of belief that puts blinders on men’s minds, and then leads them into the pit of ignorance and superstition?”
“Ye have taken away the key of knowledge,” murmured Carmen; “ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered.”
“Just so!” exclaimed Haynerd, looking at the girl who stood as a living protest against all that hampers the expansion of the human mind; that quenches its note of joy, and dulls its enlarging and ever nobler concept of God. “Now I want to know, first, if there is a God; and, if so, what He is, and what His relation is to me. I want to know what I am, and why I am here, and what future I may look forward to, if any. I don’t care two raps about a God who can’t help me here on earth, who can’t set me right and make me happy––cure my ills, meet my needs, and supply a few of the luxuries as well. And if there is a God, and we can meet Him only by dying, then why in the name of common sense all this hullabaloo about death? Why, in that case, death is the grandest thing in life! And I’m for committing suicide right away! But you preacher fellows fight death tooth and nail. You’re scared stiff when you contemplate it. You make Christianity just a grand preparation for death. Yet it isn’t the gateway to life to you, and you know it! Then why, if you are honest, do you tell such rubbish to your trusting followers?”
“I would remind you,” returned Hitt with a little laugh, “that I don’t, now.”