There was another pause, then Mère Agnès turned on her a quick, kind glance, and said:—
‘Talk to me of yourself!’
‘What manner of things shall I tell you?’ Madeleine asked nervously.
‘What of theology? Do you still fret yourself over seeming incongruities?’ she asked with a little twinkle.
‘No,’ Madeleine answered with a blush, ‘most of my doubts have been resolved.’
‘’Tis well, dear child, for abstracted speculation is but an oppilation to the free motion of the spirit. ’Tis but a faulty instrument, the intellect, even for the observing of the works of God, how little apt is it then, for the apprehension of God Himself? But the spirit is the sea of glass, wherein is imaged in lucid colours and untrembling outlines the Golden City where dwells the Lamb. Grace will be given to you, my child, to gaze into that sea where all is clear.’
She spoke in a soft, level, soothing voice. Her words were a confirmation of what Madeleine had tried to express to Jacques the other day in the garden of the Place Maubert, but suddenly—she could not have said why—she found herself echoing with much heat those very theories of his that had seemed so absurd to her then.
‘But how comes it that God is good? He commands us to forgive, while He Himself has need of unceasing propitiation and the blood of His Son to forgive the Fall of Adam. And verily ’tis a cruel, barbarous, and most unworthy motion to “visit the sins of the fathers upon the children”; a man must put on something of a devil before he can act thus. He would seem to demand perfection in us while He Himself is moved by every passion,’ and she looked at Mère Agnès half frightened, half defiant.
Mère Agnès, with knitted brows, remained silent for a moment. Then she said hesitatingly and as if thinking aloud:—