Beside herself, and out of her senses, having lost all connection with reality, ever buried in miracles, intoxicated with God and the devil, she is weakened to death: but the excess of this weakness is yet strong enough to give poison and fever in return; terrible contagion—you thought that this morally dead person would toil after you, but it is you who will follow her: she will bear away the living.
Here end the subtleties with which desire had been satisfied. A horrible light breaks upon them, and sophistry finds no longer any clouds to darken it. You see, then, when it is too late, that you have done more than you wanted. You have destroyed precisely what would have served you; for each of these suppressed powers, the will, the mind, and the heart, which now are no more, would have been for you, had they remained alive. But, alas! they are crushed, faded, and void. The essence of existence once destroyed, no longer feels; it can neither attach itself to anything, nor be captivated by anything. You wanted to bind it fast, but you have stifled it. Now you would wish her, whose life is annihilated, to be alive, or at least to revive. That is a miracle beyond your power. The thing you see, is, and ever will be, a cold shadow, without any life to answer you. Do what you will, you will find no responsive throbbing. This will be your despair. You can feign everything, and say everything, except one word, which we defy you to pronounce without grief—the sacred name of love.
Love! why, you have assassinated it! In order to love, you must have a person; but what was a person you have made a thing. Proud man! you who every day summon your Creator to descend upon the altar, you have inverted the order of creation: you have destroyed a being.
You, who, out of a GRAIN OF CORN, can make a GOD, tell me, was it not also a god that you held just now in that credulous and docile soul? what have you done with that interior god of man, that we call liberty? You have put yourself in its place; in the place of that power, by which man is man, I see nonentity.
Well! that nonentity shall be your torment. You will probe it in vain; however low you penetrate, you will find but a void, nothing, neither will nor power. There everything that could have loved has perished.
[[1]] This postponing manoeuvre is admirably calculated to draw from a woman a secret, that does not belong to confession, that she will not tell, her husband's secret, her lover's real name, &c., &c. They always get it out of her at last.
[[2]] This word Molinosism reminds us of an old forgotten system. In practice, it is a thing of all times, an instinct, a blind belief, which is natural to the weak, and which may be thus expressed:—with the strong, everything is right; a saint cannot sin. See the patient, if he is lucky enough to invite his physician to dinner with him: he has recovered his assurance and boldness, and indulges in every dish without being afraid. I believe, moreover, that real Molinosism is always a powerful argument with the simple. A contemporary writer, Llorente, relates (t. iii., ch. 28, article 2, ed. 1817), that when he was secretary to the Inquisition, they brought before that tribunal a capuchin friar, who was director of a community of Beguines, nearly all of whom he had seduced, by persuading them that they were not straying from the road to perfection. He would say to each of them, at the Confessional, that he had received a singular grace from God; "Our Lord," said he, "has deigned to appear to me in the consecrated wafer, and He has said to me, almost all the souls that you direct here are pleasant to Me, but especially such a one (the capuchin named the one he was then speaking to). She is already so perfect that she has overcome every passion, save desire, which is her torment. For this reason, wishing her virtue to be rewarded and that she should serve Me with a quiet mind, I charge you to give her dispensation, but in favour of you; she is to speak of it to no confessor; it would be useless, since with such dispensation she cannot sin." Out of seventeen Beguines, of which the community was composed, this daring capuchin gave dispensation to thirteen, who were discreet for a considerable time; one of them, however, fell ill, expected to die, and revealed all, declaring that she had never been able to believe in the dispensation, but that she had availed herself of it. If the accused party had simply confessed, he would have been let off with a very trifling punishment, the Inquisition being, says Llorente, very lenient towards that kind of offence. But, though he confessed the thing, he maintained that he had acted properly, being empowered by Jesus Christ. "What!" said they, "is it likely that our Lord appeared to you, to exempt you from a precept of the Decalogue." "Why, he exempted Abraham from the fifth commandment, ordering him to kill his son, and the Hebrews from the seventh, ordering them to rob the Egyptians." "Yes, but these were mysteries favourable to religion." "And what then is more favourable to religion than to quiet thirteen virtuous souls, and lead them to a perfect union with the divine essence?" I recollect, says Llorente, saying to him, "But, father, is it not surprising that this singular virtue happened to be precisely in the thirteen young and handsome ones, and never in the four others who were ugly or old?" He replied coldly, "The Holy Spirit inspires as it pleases."
The same author, in the same chapter, though reproaching the Protestants with having exaggerated the corruption of the confessors, avows, "In the sixteenth century, the Inquisition had imposed upon women the obligation of denouncing guilty confessors, but the denunciations were found to be so numerous, that the penitents were declared to be relieved from denouncing." Trials of this description were conducted with closed doors, and condemnations were hushed up in secret little autodafés. From the number of trials which Llorente extracts from the registers, he compares the morals of the different religious orders, and finds, in figures, a very natural result that might be guessed without the help of arithmetic. They deceived their penitents, just in proportion to the more or less money and liberty they had to seduce others with. Poor and secluded monks were dangerous confessors; friars, who had more liberty, and secular priests, seldom made use of the hazardous means of the Confessional; because they found favourable opportunities elsewhere. They who, as directors, see women tête-à-tête at home, or in their own houses, have no need to corrupt them at the altar.