"Yours," went on the Abbé, "is natural religion, the heritage of your parents; ours is revealed. Some day I will explain it to you, not—this very naïvely—with any desire to convert you, but in order to help you to understand why truth is to be found only in the arms of the Roman Church."
It puzzled him a little that we should be Protestant, it was so austere, so comfortless, so cold. "La scène-froide" was the expression he used in describing our services, "les mystères" when talking of his own. He denounced as the grossest superstition the pathetic belief of many an Irish peasant in the infallibility, the almost-divine power of the priesthood, and, unlike his colleagues in that tormented land, he is an advocate of education even on the broadest basis. "Let people think for themselves; if you keep too tight a rein they will only revolt."
That he detests the present form of Government goes without saying, his condemnation being so sweeping the big pine tree in the garden positively trembled before the winds of his rage. "Anything but this," he cried, "even a monarchy, même un Protestant, même le Roi Albert. Atheists, self-seekers all, they are ruining France," and then he repeated the oft-heard conviction that the war has been sent as a punishment for agnosticism and unbelief.
For Prefêts and Sous-Prefêts he entertains the profoundest contempt, even going as far as to designate one of the former, whom I heroically refuse to name, a gros, gras paresseux,[8] and the Sous-Prefêts the âmes damnées of the Minister of the Interieur. How he hates the whole breed of them! And how joyfully he would depose them every one! The feud between Church and State has ploughed deep furrows in his soul, and I gather that brotherly love did not continue long—supposing that it ever existed—in M. when its waves swept the village into rival factions. The Mayor, needless to say, was agnostic, and loyal to his Government; the Abbé furious, but trying hard to be impartial, to eschew politics, and serve his God. He might have succeeded had not the spirit of mischief that lurks in his eye betrayed him and dragged him from his precarious fence. He plunged into the controversy, but—oh, M. l'Abbé! M. l'Abbé!—in patois and in the columns of the local Press. Now his knowledge of patois, gathered as a boy, had been carefully hidden under a bushel, and so the authorship of the fierce, sarcastic, ironical letters was never known, nor did M. le Maire ever guess why the priest's eyes twinkled so wickedly when he passed him in the street.
They twinkled as he told the story, thoroughly enjoying his little ruse, but grew fierce again when he talked of Freemasons. To say that he thinks Freemasonry an incarnation of the devil is to put his feelings mildly. They are, he declares, the enemy of all virtue, purity and truth; criminal atheists, hotbeds of everything evil, their "tendency" resolutely set against good. They are insidious, corrupt; defilers of public morals and public taste.
"But, M. l'Abbé," I cried, "that is not so. In England——" I gave him a few facts. It shook him somewhat to hear that the late King Edward, whom he profoundly admires, was a Mason, but he recovered himself quickly.
"Perhaps in England they may seem good, there may even be good people among them, poor dupes who do not see below the surface. There all is corruption, the goodness is only a mask worn to deceive the ignorant and the credulous. Ah, the evil they have wrought in the world! It was they who brought about the war (its Divine origin was for the moment forgotten), they were undermining Europe, they would drag her down into the pit, to filth and decay."
It was odd to hear such words from the lips of so kindly, so wise a man, and one with so profound a knowledge of human nature. He told me that in all his years of ministry at M. there was only one illegitimate birth in the village—a statement which students of De Maupassant will find it difficult to believe.
We were talking of certain moral problems intensified by the war, the perpetually recurring "sex-question," not any more insistent perhaps in France than elsewhere, but obtruding itself less ashamedly upon the notice. It was the acceptance, the toleration of certain things that puzzled me, an acceptance which I am sometimes tempted to believe is due to some deep, wise understanding of human frailty, of the fierceness of human passions, the weakness of human will when Love has taken over the citadel of the heart. Or is it due to fatalism, the conviction that it is useless to strive against what cannot be altered, absurd to fight Nature in her unbridled moods?
The priest, needless to say, neither accepted nor condoned. He blamed public opinion, above all he blamed the unbelief of the people, and then he told me of M. and the purity of the life there. Only one girl in all those years, and she, after her baby was born, led so exemplary, so modest a life that its father subsequently married her, and together they built up one of the happiest homes in the village. (You will gather that the Abbé was not above entertaining at least one popular superstition in that he insinuated that all the blame rested on the shoulders of the woman.)