"This and similar discoveries have sometimes given me, I own, a feeling of blank disappointment, and even of terror," said Carlos at length. For with him it was one of those rare hours in which a man can bear to translate into words the "dark misgivings" of the soul, usually unacknowledged even to himself.
"I cannot say," was the answer, "that the thought of passing through the gate of death into the immediate presence of my glorified Lord affects me with 'blank disappointment' or 'terror.'"
"How?--What do you say?" cried Carlos, starting visibly.
"'Absent from the body, present with the Lord.' 'To depart and to be with Christ is far better.'"
"But it was San Pablo, the great apostle and martyr, who said that. For us,--we have the Church's teaching," Carlos rejoined in quick, anxious tones.
"Nevertheless, I venture to think that, in the face of all you have learned from God's Word, you will find it a task somewhat of the hardest to prove purgatory."
"Not at all," said Carlos; and immediately he bounded into the arena of controversy, laid his lance in rest, and began an animated tilting-match with his new friend, who was willing (of course, thought Carlos, for argument's sake alone, and as an intellectual exercise) to personate a Lutheran antagonist.
But not a few doughty champions have met the stern reality of a bloody death in the mimic warfare of the tilting-field. At every turn Carlos found himself answered, baffled, confounded. Yet, how could he, how dared he, acknowledge defeat, even to himself, when with the imperilled doctrine so much else must fall? What would become of private masses, indulgences, prayers for the dead? Nay, what would become of the infallibility of Mother Church herself?
So he fought desperately. Fear, ever increasing, quickened his preceptions, baptized his lips with eloquence, made his sense acute and his memory retentive. Driven at last from the ground of Scripture and reason, he took his stand upon that of scholastic divinity. Using the weapons with which he had been taught to play so deftly for once in terrible earnest, he spun clever syllogisms, in which he hoped to entangle his adversary. But De Seso caught the flimsy webs in the naked hand of his strong sense, and crushed them to atoms.
Then Carlos knew that the battle was lost. "I can say no more," he acknowledged, sorrowfully bowing his head.