“My dear friend,” I answered,“ “Now, please tell me the names of the Holy Fathers who have preached that we must believe in the Immaculate Conception, or be forever damned if we do not believe in it!”
I answered my parishioner: “I would have preferred, my dear friend, that you should have never come to put to me these questions; but as you ask me the truth, I must tell you the truth. I have studied the Fathers with a pretty good attention, but I have not yet found a single one of them who was of that opinion in any way.”
“I hope,” added the good farmer, “you will excuse me if I put to you another question on this subject. Perhaps you do not know it, but there is a great deal of feeling and talking about this new article of faith among us since last Sabbath; I want to know a little more about it. The pope says in his letter that the Church of Rome has always believed and taught that dogma of Immaculate Conception. Is that correct?”
“Yes, my friend, the pope says that in his Encyclical; but these last nine hundred years more than one hundred popes have declared that the church had never believed it. Even several popes have forbidden to say ‘that the Immaculate Conception was an article of faith’—and they solemnly permitted us to believe and say what we please on that matter.”
“If it be so with this new dogma, how can we know it is not so with the other dogmas of our church, as the confession, the purgatory, etc.?” added the farmer.
“My dear friend, do not allow the devil to shake your faith. We are living in bad days, indeed. Let us pray God to enlighten us and save us. I would have given much had you never put to me these questions!”
My honest parishioner had left me; but his awful questions (they were really awful, as they are still awful for a priest of Rome), and the answers I had been forced to give were sounding in my soul as thunder-claps. There was in my poor trembling heart, as the awful noise of an irresistible storm which was to destroy all that I had so dearly cherished and respected in my then so dear and venerated Church of Rome. My head was aching. I fell on my knees; but for a time I could not utter a word of prayer; big tears were rolling on my burning cheeks; new light was coming before the eyes of my soul; but I took it for the deceitful temptation of Satan; a voice was speaking to me—it was the voice of my God, telling me, “Come out from Babylon!” But I took that voice for the voice of Satan; I was trying to silence it. The Lord was then drawing me away from my perishing ways; but I did not know Him then; I was struggling against Him to remain in the dark dungeons of error. But God was to be the stronger. In His infinite mercy He was to overpower His unfaithful servant; He was to conquer me, and with me many others.
Chapter LIV
THE ABOMINATIONS OF AURICULAR CONFESSION.
There are two women who ought to be constant objects of the compassion of the disciples of Christ, and for whom daily prayers ought to be offered at the mercy-seat—the Brahmin woman, who, deceived by her priests, burns herself on the corpse of her husband to appease the wrath of her wooden gods; and the Roman Catholic woman, who, not less deceived by her priests, suffers a torture far more cruel and ignominious in the confessional-box, to appease the wrath of her wafer-god.