"You were incredulous when I asserted that a day's reading in Leonard's library would account for the present condition of his wife. It's only fair to allow me to justify my assertion."
"You have read enough to drive me crazy, if for one moment I believed it."
"Hardly. You are not a recently bereaved mother; you are not just emerging from a condition consequent upon disturbance of the physical economy which has reacted upon the mental; you are not inclined to mysticism, to see visions, to find pictures in goblets of water or in grate fires; in short, while you have your own idiosyncrasies, they are not of a character to render you liable to this sort of transport. But there are organizations which, though seduced by mystic lore, can hardly contemplate such matters without injury. The compiler of this book, the men he quotes, the ecstatics in general—revivalists, hermits, nuns and monks in all ages—do you believe that as a class they were well balanced? Peering into heaven is a dangerous business."
"The men you have quoted seem to have peered into hell."
"That is the Puritan mode of ecstatic enjoyment. Our Catholic—I beg your pardon, our Roman Catholic—enthusiasts, being more artistic, and lovers of the beautiful, prefer contemplation of heaven. Unlike the smug Puritan, they do not spare their bodies. They fast and flog, wear hair shirts, roll in ashes and wash seldom, but their eyes are turned upward; they urge the spirit to rejoice. Your fat and well-fed Calvinist prefers a gloom irradiated by the flames of hell, in which he can behold the writhing victims of God's vanity——"
"Doctor, you are as bitter as all your brethren; you unbeliever——"
"I don't know that I'm more of an unbeliever than you are. I'm sure if the Reverend Eliphalet has not by this time modified his opinions, he has no expectation of meeting you in heaven. Hear him as he warns humanity against the devices of Satan: 'Of which,' he says, 'the traces are visible even in the church. In these days there hath arisen a delusive hope as to infants. Some hold, and a few dare to assert, though with bated breath, that all infants die in the grace of God. Who saith this? Not God, who, by His Eternal Decree, hath declared that none but His Elect are saved. Not our Confession of Faith, formulated at Westminster in earnest prayer and reverence for the Word. Not the framers of that Confession, of whom I may mention Twisse, as having specially wrote against this new-born folly, extorted by the cunning of the Enemy of Souls by means of the bleatings of foolish mothers—search the Scripture, reader! Nowhere shalt thou find any saved but His Elect.'"
"Abominable!" ejaculated the lady.
"Poetical. 'Bleatings of foolish mothers' is quite so. And now our good man actually drops into the poetry of the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, whose 'Day of Doom' he quotes at length. I will not inflict the whole fifteen stanzas upon you; but listen to a morsel or two. This is the Argument: The Still-born appear at the Seat of Mercy, and put in a plea for grace that might have weight in Senegambia, but which has none in the heaven of Eliphalet and of Hampton:
'Then to the bar they all drew near who died in Infancy,
And never had, or good or bad, effected personally,
But from the womb unto the tomb were straightway carried
(Or at the least, ere they transgressed), who thus began to plead.'