‘You judge spiritual feelings by the carnal test of the understanding; your Protestant horror of asceticism lies at the root of all you say. How can you comprehend the self-satisfaction, the absolute delight, of self-punishment?’
‘So far from it, I have always had an infinite respect for asceticism, as a noble and manful thing—the only manful thing to my eyes left in popery; and fast dying out of that under Jesuit influence. You recollect the quarrel between the Tablet and the Jesuits, over Faber’s unlucky honesty about St. Rose of Lima? . . . But, really, as long as you honour asceticism as a means of appeasing the angry deities, I shall prefer to St. Dominic’s cuirass or St. Hedwiga’s chilblains, John Mytton’s two hours’ crawl on the ice in his shirt, after a flock of wild ducks. They both endured like heroes; but the former for a selfish, if not a blasphemous end; the latter, as a man should, to test and strengthen his own powers of endurance. . . . There, I will say no more. Go your way, in God’s name. There must be lessons to be learnt in all strong and self-restraining action. . . . So you will learn something from the scourge and the hair-shirt. We must all take the bitter medicine of suffering, I suppose.’
‘And, therefore, I am the wiser, in forcing the draught on myself.’
‘Provided it be the right draught, and do not require another and still bitterer one to expel the effects of the poison. I have no faith in people’s doctoring themselves, either physically or spiritually.’
‘I am not my own physician; I follow the rules of an infallible Church, and the examples of her canonised saints.’
‘Well . . . perhaps they may have known what was best for themselves. . . . But as for you and me here, in the year 1849. . . . However, we shall argue on for ever. Forgive me if I have offended you.’
‘I am not offended. The Catholic Church has always been a persecuted one.’
‘Then walk with me a little way, and I will persecute you no more.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To . . . To—’ Lancelot had not the heart to say whither.