By that time his host had learned the name and character of his guest. He was a Protestant clergyman of Switzerland, called La Roche, a widower, who had lately buried his wife, after a long and lingering illness, for which travelling had been prescribed, and was now returning home, after an ineffectual and melancholy journey, with his only child, the daughter we have mentioned.
He was a devout man, as became his profession. He possessed devotion in all its warmth, but with none of its asperity,—I mean that asperity which men, called devout, sometimes indulge in.
Mr. ——, though he felt no devotion, never quarrelled with it in others. His gouvernante joined the old man and his daughter in the prayers and thanksgivings which they put up on his recovery; for she too was a heretic, in the phrase of the village. The philosopher walked out, with his long staff and his dog, and left them to their prayers and thanksgivings.
“My master,” said the old woman, “alas! he is not a Christian; but he is the best of unbelievers.”
“Not a Christian!” exclaimed Mademoiselle La Roche, “yet he saved my father! Heaven bless him for it! I would he were a Christian.”
“There is a pride in human knowledge, my child,” said her father, “which often blinds men to the sublime truths of revelation; hence opposers of Christianity are found among men of virtuous lives, as well as among those of dissipated and licentious characters. Nay, sometimes I have known the latter more easily converted to the true faith than the former, because the fume of passion is more easily dissipated than the mist of false theory and delusive speculation.”
“But Mr. ——,” said his daughter, “alas! my father, he shall be a Christian before he dies.” She was interrupted by the arrival of their landlord. He took her hand with an air of kindness. She drew it away from him in silence, threw down her eyes to the ground, and left the room.
“I have been thanking God,” said the good La Roche, “for my recovery.”
“That is right,” replied his landlord.
“I would not wish,” continued the old man hesitatingly, “to think otherwise. Did I not look up with gratitude to that Being, I should barely be satisfied with my recovery as a continuation of life, which, it may be, is not a real good. Alas! I may live to wish I had died, that you had left me to die, sir, instead of kindly relieving me,”—he clasped Mr ——’s hand,—“but, when I look on this renovated being as the gift of the Almighty, I feel a far different sentiment; my heart dilates with gratitude and love to him; it is prepared for doing his will, not as a duty, but as a pleasure, and regards every breach of it, not with disapprobation, but with horror.”