One day when I was eating my lunch near a fountain, there came up a moody, meditative hen, crooning plaintively after her wont. I threw her a crumb of bread while she was still a good way off, and then threw more, getting her to come a little closer and a little closer each time; at last she actually took a piece from my hand. She did not quite like it, but she did it. This is the evolution principle; and if we wish those who differ from us to understand us, it is the only method to proceed upon. I have sometimes thought that some of my friends among the priests have been treating me as I treated the meditative hen. But what of that? They will not kill and eat me, nor take my eggs. Whatever, therefore, promotes a more friendly feeling between us must be pure gain.
The mistake our advanced Liberals make is that of flinging much too large pieces of bread at a time, and flinging them at their hen, instead of a little way off her. Of course the hen is fluttered and driven away. Sometimes, too, they do not sufficiently distinguish between bread and stones.
As a general rule, the common people treat the priests respectfully, but once I heard several attacking one warmly on the score of eternal punishment. “Sarà,” said one, “per cento anni, per cinque cento, per mille o forse per dieci mille anni, ma non sarà eterna; perchè il Dio è un uomo forte—grande, generoso, di buon cuore.” [111] An Italian told me once that if ever I came upon a priest whom I wanted to tease, I was to ask him if he knew a place called La Torre Pellice. I have never yet had the chance of doing this; for, though I am fairly quick at seeing whether I am likely to get on with a priest or no, I find the priest is generally fairly quick too; and I am no sooner in a diligence or railway carriage with an unsympathetic priest, than he curls himself round into a moral ball and prays horribly—bristling out with collects all over like a cross-grained spiritual hedgehog. Partly, therefore, from having no wish to go out of my way to make myself obnoxious, and partly through the opposite party being determined that I shall not get the chance, the question about La Torre Pellice has never come off, and I do not know what a priest would say if the subject were introduced,—but I did get a talking about La Torre Pellice all the same.
I was going from Turin to Pinerolo, and found myself seated opposite a fine-looking elderly gentleman who was reading a paper headed, “Le Témoin, Echo des Vallées Vaudoises”: for the Vaudois, or Waldenses, though on the Italian side of the Alps, are French in language and perhaps in origin. I fell to talking with this gentleman, and found he was on his way to La Torre Pellice, the headquarters of indigenous Italian evangelicism. He told me there were about 25,000 inhabitants of these valleys, and that they were without exception Protestant, or rather that they had never accepted Catholicism, but had retained the primitive Apostolic faith in its original purity. He hinted to me that they were descendants of some one or more of the lost ten tribes of Israel. The English, he told me (meaning, I gather, the English of the England that affects Exeter Hall), had done great things for the inhabitants of La Torre at different times, and there were streets called the Via Williams and Via Beckwith. They were, he said, a very growing sect, and had missionaries and establishments in all the principal cities in North Italy; in fact, so far as I could gather, they were as aggressive as malcontents generally are, and, Italians though they were, would give away tracts just as readily as we do. I did not, therefore, go to La Torre.
Sometimes priests say things, as a matter of course, which would make any English clergyman’s hair stand on end. At one town there is a remarkable fourteenth-century bridge, commonly known as “The Devil’s Bridge.” I was sketching near this when a jolly old priest with a red nose came up and began a conversation with me. He was evidently a popular character, for every one who passed greeted him. He told me that the devil did not really build the bridge. I said I presumed not, for he was not in the habit of spending his time so well.
“I wish he had built it,” said my friend; “for then perhaps he would build us some more.”
“Or we might even get a church out of him,” said I, a little slyly.
“Ha, ha, ha! we will convert him, and make a good Christian of him in the end.”
When will our Protestantism, or Rationalism, or whatever it may be, sit as lightly upon ourselves?