'My dear friend,' said the priest tenderly—'He offers us Himself.'
She smiled, most brightly.
'Don't quarrel with me—with my poor words. He is there—there!'—she said under her breath.
And he saw the motion of her white fingers towards her breast.
Afterwards he sat beside her for some time in silence, thinking of the great world of Rome, and of his long conflict there.
Form after form appeared to him of those men, stupid or acute, holy or worldly, learned or ignorant, who at the heart of Catholicism are engaged in that amazing struggle with knowledge which perhaps represents the only condition under which knowledge—the awful and irresistible—can in the long run safely incorporate itself with the dense mass of human life. He thought of scholar after scholar crushed by the most incompetent of judges; this man silenced by a great post, that man by exile, one through the best of his nature, another through the worst. He saw himself sitting side by side with one of the most-eminent theologians of the Roman Church; he recalled the little man, black-haired, lively, corpulent, a trifle underhung, with a pleasant lisp and a merry eye; he remembered the incredible conversation, the sense of difficulty and shame under which he had argued some of the common-places of biology and primitive history, as educated Europe understands them; the half patronising, half impatient glibness of the other.—
'Oh! you know better, my son, than I how to argue these things; you are more learned, of course. But it is only a matter for the Catechism after all. Obey, my friend, obey!—there is no more to be said.'
And his own voice—tremulous:
'I would obey if I could. But unhappy as I am, to betray truths that are as evident to me as the sun in heaven would make me still unhappier. The fate that threatens me is frightful. Aber ich kann nicht anders. The truth holds me in a vice.'—
'Let me give you a piece of counsel. You sit too close to your books.
You read and read,—you spin yourself into your own views like a cocoon.
Travel—hear what others say—above all, go into retreat! No one need know.
It would do you much good.'