“For which reason, my friend,” replied Clement, “you are excessively lean—the inevitable consequence of the reaction of anxiety of soul upon its poor servant, the body; for there are many fools who confound all and disown the soul, because they are ashamed of their hearts and can discern only their bodies. As if we could destroy that which God has made, or discover the knots of the lines he has hidden! He has willed that man
should be at the same time spirit and matter, and that these two should be entirely united; and very cunning must he be who will change that union one iota. They will search in vain for the place of the soul; they will no more find where it is than where it is not. Would you believe—but this is a thing I keep secret because of the honor of our science—that I have a pupil who asserts that we have no soul, because, says this beardless doctor, he has never been able to distinguish the moment when the soul escaped from the body of the dying! Do you not wonder at the force of that argument? And would it not be in fact a very beautiful thing to observe, and a singular spectacle to see, our souls suddenly provided with large and handsome wings of feathers, or hair, or some other material, to use in flying around and ascending whither God calls them? Now, dear friends, believe what I tell you: the more we learn, the more we perceive that we know nothing. Our intelligence goes only so far as to enable us to understand effects, to gather them together, to describe them, and in some cases to reproduce them; but as for the causes, that is an order of things into which it is absolutely useless to wish to penetrate.”
“Come, now, here is Clement going into his scientific dissertations, in place of telling us what was in Cranmer’s letter!” cried Ludovico, interrupting him.
“Ah! that is because I understand them better; and I prefer my crucibles, my nerves and bones, to the subtleties, the falsehoods, of your pretended casuists. Boxol could tell you that very well; but after all I have been obliged to laugh at the sententious manner, grave and peremptory, in which
this archbishop, prelate, primate, orthodox according to the new order, commands the king to quit his wicked life and hasten to separate from his brother’s wife, under pain of incurring ecclesiastical censure and being excommunicated. What think you of that? And while they distribute copies of this lofty admonition among the good tradesmen of London, who can neither read nor write, nor see much farther than the end of their noses and the bottom of their money-bags, they have entered proceedings at Dunstable against that poor Queen Catherine, who is cast out on the world and knows not where to go. Can anything more ridiculous or more pitiable be found? Ha! ha! do you not agree with me?”
“Verily,” said Boxol, who became crimson with anger, “Clement, I detest hearing such things laughed at.”
“Ah! my poor friend,” replied Clement, “would you have me weep, then? Your men are such droll creatures! When one studies them deeply, he is obliged to ridicule them; otherwise we should die with weeping.”
“He is right,” said John Story. “We see how they dispute and flay each other daily for a piece of meadow, a rut in the road which I could hold in the hollow of my hand. They write volumes on the subject; they sweat blood and water; they compel five hundred arrests; then afterwards they are astonished to find they have spent four times as much money as the thing they might have gained was worth. Why cannot men live at peace? If you put them off without wishing to press the suit, they become furious; and yet they always begin by representing their
affairs to you in so equitable a light that the devil himself would be deceived. There is one thing I have observed, and that is, there is nothing which has the appearance of being in such good faith as a litigant whose case is bad, and who knows his cause to be unjust.”
“Come, my friends,” cried Clement, “you speak well; all that excites compassion. You often ridicule me and what you please to call my simplicity, and yet I see everything just as clearly as anybody else; but I have a plain way of dealing, and I do not seek so much cunning. If God calls me, I answer at once: Lord, here I am! I have spent the nights of my youth in studying, in learning, in comparing; I have examined and gone to the depths of all the philosophers of antiquity, apparently so lucid, so luminous; I have found only pride, weakness, darkness, and barrenness. I have recognized that it was all profitless and led to no good; it was always the man that I was finding; and of that I had enough in myself to guide and support. Then I took the Bible, and I felt that it was God who spoke to me from its inspired pages; whereat I abandoned my learning and all those philosophical wranglings which weary the mind without bettering the heart. I go straight to my object without vexing myself with anything. There are things which I do not understand. That is natural, since it has pleased God to conceal them from me. Evidently I do not need to comprehend them, since he has not revealed them; and there is no reason, because I find some obscurities, why I should abandon the light which burns in their midst. ‘Master Clement,’ they ask me, ‘how did God make that?’ ‘Why that?’ My dear friends, this is just