And in these days, surely, we dare not think such a past as that of English religious intolerance so far from us as that it should never draw near us again, and renew itself in many shapes of tyranny and horror. And this, not only in England, where religious persecution may suddenly emerge from the apparent extreme of religious indifference, and where it may be carried on, some day, on members of all Christian communities, no longer in the name of a state church or a general catechism, but in the name of rabid hatred to a Creator, God, and senseless chafing against any constituted authority—not only, I say, may this happen in England, but in other lands, Eastern and Western, old and new.
We see it to-day in red-handed France and Judas-tongued Italy; we may see it elsewhere to-morrow. Persecution is an instinct of the brute; what is not after its own kind, it has no desire to spare. The prevailing systems of philosophy—if we may so degrade the word whose first meaning is love of wisdom—tend to the apotheosis of the brute, and the negation and indignant repudiation of anything in man above the brute. When this task shall be completed, and man educated into the right usage of his newly-discovered nature, what are we to expect but persecution in one form or another from the new lords of the creation, the new monarchs of the system of materialistic supremacy?
There is a new and subtle alchemy running through the so-called moral world, the Areopagus of modern thinkers. Of old, all things might be resolved into component parts, of which gold was infallibly one; now, all men must be resolved into perishable parts, of which each one is stamped with the brand of the brute.
It is a sad contrast, and no doubt it would be needless to define which of the two is the more harmful theory. Let us pass now from the life of the hidden pastor of an obscure village to an incident, perhaps hardly better known, in the career of one of the apostles of a great and glorious city, the same whose comeliness has been so cruelly brought low, and whose desolation at this moment reminds one too forcibly of the plaint of the prophet Jeremiah over doomed Jerusalem.
The Père de Ravignan, whose name is a household word in France, and whose influence over the young men of his day was something all but miraculous, was summoned one night to attend a sick-call. A carriage was in attendance; the two men who had come for him represented the case as of the greatest urgency, but refused to take him with them unless he suffered himself to be blindfolded. After briefly hesitating, he complied with this strange request. The times were dangerous, revolution was hovering like a storm over the state, secret societies were in ever-watchful and almost infallibly secure fermentation. He himself was a well-known man, a representative man, one whose voice was ever raised uncompromisingly against the foes of law and order—one whose life was every day exposed, in consequence of his grand fearlessness of conscience, to the machinations of hidden and treacherous enemies. A less suspicious man might have feared a snare in this strange condition of blindfolding a priest called to a death-bed, but the blood of the old race of gentilhommes that was fast disappearing, added to the courage of the consecrated line of God's ministers that never disappears, made the Jesuit strong in this hour of peril, and he forgot himself to think only of the sinking soul to whose aid he was summoned. He took the holy oils and the viaticum with him, and left the house in the Rue de Sèvres in the carriage that was waiting at the door.
They drove off rapidly; his companions pulled down the blinds, and effectually shut out any daylight that might straggle in. The motion of the vehicle, however, and the many sudden jerks it gave, indicated turnings and corners as being constantly doubled, and even suggested the not unlikely idea that this was done on purpose, with the object of confusing the priest's recollection. The two men preserved a dead silence all the time. At last the carriage stopped; the door was opened, the Père de Ravignan helped out, and conducted up a wide staircase; doors were opened and shut, and then the bandage was taken from his eyes, and he found himself in a large anteroom, handsomely and massively furnished.
"In the end room of this suite of apartments, you will find the person who requires your ministry," said one of his guides.
He passed room after room with the windows darkened, and rich furniture giving a sumptuous air to the large and airy saloons, but order reigned everywhere. He saw neither sign of confusion nor heard any sound of sorrow, nothing to indicate the presence of death or mortal sickness. He began to fear that in truth he had been snared by secret enemies, and that it was his own death he had to expect as the dénouement of this solemn masquerade. The last door was reached; a curtain hung across the entrance, and the chamber was darkened. One lamp burned in the furthest recess. He looked in vain for signs of sickness; there were none. The room was a drawing-room, and was furnished much like the rest. But soon a form rose to meet him, coming slowly from the luxurious lounge near the solitary lamp. It was that of a young man, very handsome, and fashionably dressed. He looked pale and anxious, and his hands trembled slightly as he moved. Yet sick to death he certainly was not. Was this his executioner, or some part of the ghastly pageant of his own coming doom? The priest paused, and the young stranger said, in eager, hollow tones:
"Mon père, it is for me that you are here. I am going to die. I shall be dead within twenty-four hours, but I obtained this favor that I might first make my peace with God."
"My son, what does this mean?" asked the priest. "You are not ill!"