The Secret Chamber at Chad

by Evelyn Everett-Green

But not even to his brothers did he tell all that he had heard and all that he knew. The words of the gospel in the familiar language of his country haunted him persistently. He felt a strange wish to hear more, although he believed the wish to be sin, and strove against it might and main. Some of the passages clung tenaciously to his memory, and he fell asleep repeating them. When he woke the words were yet in his mind, and they seemed to get between him and the words of his task that day when the boys went to their tutor for daily instruction.

Brother Emmanuel had never found Edred so inattentive and absent before. He divined that the boy must have something on his mind, and let him alone. He was not surprised that he lingered when the others had gone, and then in a low voice asked his preceptor if he would meet him in the chantry, as he felt he could not be happy till he had made confession of a certain matter, done penance, and received absolution.

A request of that sort never met a denial from the monk. He sent Edred to the chantry to pray for an hour, and met him there at the end of that time to listen to all he had to say.

Edred's story was soon told--nothing held back, not even the innermost thoughts of his heart--and the expression of the face beneath the enshrouding cowl was something strange to see.

It was long before the monk spoke, and meantime Edred lay prostrate at his feet, thankful to transfer the burden weighing him down to the keeping of another, but little guessing what the burden was to him to whom he made this confession.

Well did Brother Emmanuel know and recognize the peril of entertaining such thoughts, longings, and aspirations as were now assailing the heart of this unconscious boy. That there was sin in all these feelings he did not doubt; that heavy penance must be done for them he would not for a moment have wished to deny. But yet when he came to place reason in the place of the formulas of the Church in which he had been reared, he knew not how to condemn that longing after the Word of God which was generally the first step towards the dreaded sin of heresy.

No one more sincerely abhorred the name and the sin of heresy. When men denied the presence of the living God in the sacraments of the Church, or attacked its time-honoured practices in which the heart of the young monk was bound up, then the whole soul of the enthusiast rose up in revolt, and he felt that such blasphemers well deserved the fiery doom they brought upon themselves. But when their sin was possessing a copy of the living Word; when all that could be alleged against them was that they met together to read that Word which was denied to them by their lawful pastors and teachers, and which they had no opportunity of hearing otherwise--then indeed did it seem a hard thing that they should be so mercilessly condemned and persecuted.

Yet he could not deny that this reading and expounding of the Scriptures by the ignorant and unlearned led almost invariably to those other sins of blasphemy and irreverence which curdled the very blood in his veins. Again and again had his heart burned within him to go forth amongst the people himself; to take upon himself and put in practice the office of evangelist, which he knew to be a God-appointed ministry, and yet which was so seldom worthily fulfilled, and himself to proclaim aloud the gospel, that all might have news of the Son of God, yet might be taught to reverence the holy sacraments more rather than less for the sake of Him who established them upon earth, and to respect the priesthood, even though it might in its members show itself unworthy, because it was a thing given by Christ for the edification of the body, and because He Himself, the High Priest passed into the heavens, must needs have His subordinate priests working with Him and by Him on earth.

Again and again had longings such as these filled his soul, and he had implored leave to go forth preaching and teaching. But he had never won permission to do this. The request had been treated with contempt, and he himself had been suspected of ambition and other unworthy motives. He had submitted to the will of his superiors, as his vow of obedience obliged him to do; but none the less did his heart burn within him as he saw more and more plainly how men were thirsting for living waters, and realized with ever-increasing intensity of pain and certainty that if the Church herself would not give her children to drink out of pure fountains, they would not be hindered from drinking of poisoned springs, and thus draw down upon themselves all manner of evils and diseases.

He had never doubted for a moment the pureness of the source from which he himself drank. He was not blind to the imperfections many and great of individuals in high places, and the corruptions which had crept within the pale of the Church, but these appeared to him incidental and capable of amendment. He never guessed at any deeper poison at work far below, tainting the very waters at their source. He was in all essential points an orthodox son of Rome; but he had imbibed much of the spirit of the Oxford Reformers, of whom Colet was at this time the foremost, and his more enlightened outlook seemed to the blind and bigoted of his own order to savour something dangerously of heresy.