“No doubt the seed you sow to-day is often watered with your tears; but before long you will reap the richest crop, and your heart will be filled with joy when your grateful country will bless your name.”
After a few other sentences of the same elevated sentiments, he hardly gave me time enough to express my feelings of gratitude, and said: “I know you are very busy, I do not want to trespass upon your time. Good-bye, sir; may the Lord bless you, and be your keeper in all your ways.”
He pressed my hand, and soon disappeared. I would try, in vain, to express what I felt when alone with my God, after that strange and providential visit. My first thought was to fall on my knees and thank that merciful God for having sent me such a messenger to cheer me in one of the darkest hours of my life; for every word from his lips had fallen on my wounded soul as the oil of the Good Samaritan on the bleeding wounds of the traveler to Jericho. There had been such an elevation of thought, such a ring of true, simple but sublime faith and piety; such love of man and fear of God in all that he had said. It was the first time I had heard words so conformable to my personal views and profound convictions on that subject. That stranger, whose visit had passed as quickly as the visit of an angel from God, had filled my heart with such joy and surprise at the unexpected news that all the English-speaking people of Canada were praying for me!
However, I did not fall on my knees to thank God; for my sentiments of gratitude to God were suddenly chilled by the unspeakable humiliation I felt when I considered that that stranger was a Protestant!
The comparison I was forced to make between the noble sentiments, the high philosophy, the Christian principles of that Protestant layman with the low expressions of contempt, the absolute want of generous and Christian thoughts of my bishop and my fellow-priests when they were turning into ridicule that temperance society which God was so visibly presenting to us as the best, if not the only way, to save the thousands of drunkards who were perishing around us, paralyzed my lips, bewildered my mind, and made it impossible for me to utter a word of prayer. My first sentiments of joy and of gratitude to God soon gave way to sentiments of unspeakable shame and distress.
I was forced to acknowledge that these Protestants, whom my Church had taught me, through all her councils, to anathematize and curse as the damned slaves and followers of Satan, were, in their principles of morality, higher above us than the heavens are above the earth! I had to confess to myself that those heretics, whom my Church had taught me to consider as rebels against Christ and His Church, knew the laws of God and followed them much more closely than ourselves. They had raised themselves to the highest degree of Christian temperance, when my bishops, with their priests, were swimming in the deadly waters of drunkenness!
A voice seemed crying to me: “Where is the superiority of holiness of your proud Church of Rome over those so-called heretics, who follow more closely the counsels and precepts of the gospel of Christ?”
I tried to stifle that voice, but I could not. Louder and louder it was heard asking me: “Who is nearer God—the bishop, who so obstinately opposes a reform which is so evidently according to the Divine Word, or those earnest followers of the gospel, who make the sacrifice of their old and most cherished usages with such pleasure, when they see it is for the good of their fellow-men and the glory of God?”
I wished then to be a hundred feet below the ground, in order not to hear those questions answered within my soul. But there was no help; I had to hear them, and to blush at the reality before my eyes.
Pride! yes, diabolical pride! is the vice, par excellence, of every priest of Rome. Just as he is taught to believe and say that his church is far above every other church, so he is taught to believe and say that, as a priest, he is above all the kings, emperors, governors and presidents of this world. That pride is the daily bread of the pope, the bishop, the priests, and even the lowest layman in the Church of Rome.