Dick drew a deep breath, and his pale face blushed all over with a sudden delight; but said nothing.
“When a man first thinks of choosing God,” the priest said, “he may mistake. But when God chooses a man, and tears away from him every other tie, and sets him in a place where he can see nothing surrounding him but a great solitude filled with God, then there is no mistake. I believe that God chooses you.”
“God chooses me!” repeated Dick Rowan, blenching a little, like one dazzled by a great light. “God chooses me!” he said again, and stood up, as if his swelling heart had lifted him. “Then I choose him!” He put his hands over his lifted face, and tears of joy dropped down. Father John, deeply affected, spoke to him, but he did not hear. He was repeating the words of the marriage-service: “‘For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us’—unite!”
The priest spoke afterward to Edith on the subject. Dick had requested him to tell her and his mother whatever they wished to know.
“Never was there a soul more ardent and single,” Father John said. “His only difficulty arose from a tender regard for the honor of God, and a great reverence for the sacred office. He fancied that it would be an insult to both for a man to seek to enter the priesthood of whom people could say that he did so because he was disappointed in love, and that he gave to God the remnant of a heart which a woman had rejected.”
“Dick rejected me,” Edith interposed hastily.
“I told him,” the priest resumed, “that if God had called him, he had no right to think of any coarse and uncharitable remarks which might be made. I reminded him that his life-long devotion to you had been a life without faith, and that, after one year in the church, he had given you up willingly. His idea of the true priest was this: one for whose sacred vocation his pious parents had prayed and hoped from the hour of his birth, who had lived from his childhood cloistered in retirement and sanctity, who had never cherished worldly hopes or desires, but, walking apart, had thus approached the altar that had never ceased to shine before him from the hour of his baptism. I owned to him that such a vocation is beautiful, and is often seen by men and angels; but told him that there are others whom the Almighty leads differently. He hides from such souls that he has sealed them also from the beginning, he allows them to drag in the mire of earth, to feel its temptations, to share in its weaknesses. We cannot penetrate the designs of God, but we may well believe that his motive is to humble that soul, and to teach it through its own failings a greater pity and tenderness for the weak and the erring. I warned him that this fear of his might be a temptation of the devil, who saw that his pride was not broken, and who pursuaded him that he was jealous for the honor of God, when in reality he thought but of his own. He was happy at that. ‘If it is nothing but my own pride,’ he said, ‘I have no more trouble.’
“And he has no more trouble, my child,” the priest concluded. “He is the happiest man I ever saw!”