"Oh! what will F. Chevreuse say to me?" she murmured. "What would dear Mother Chevreuse have said to me? It is all my fault! I had too much confidence in my own wisdom! They were right: there should be no intimacy with unbelievers."
"And so you hate creeds?" F. Chevreuse was saying, in reply to an exclamation of Mr. Schöninger's. "And what of your own, pray?"
The Jew drew away, with a slightly impatient gesture, when the priest made a motion to take his arm. He had no desire to advance a step toward that barrier against which he had just bruised himself. The warning, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," was too fresh in his memory.
"My creed," he answered, "is not one of those inexorable ones that life dashes men against, as the sea dashes them on the rocks. It does not preach charity and practise hate. It does not set up barriers between man and man, and treat nine-tenths of the world as heathen. It does not profess the most sublime reliance on God, and then practise the most subtle worldly wisdom. It is not even the old Jewish belief in its formality. That was as the roots of a plant of which true Judaism is the blossom. We cling to the old name, and some cling to the old belief, merely because it has been hated and persecuted. If my forefathers rejected and crucified him whom you call the Christ, your church has excluded and crucified my people till they have bled at every pore. They have been mocked, and beaten, and spit upon; and yet you say that the dying prayer of your Model was, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' However it may be with individuals in your church—and I have found them noble and charitable—as a sect,
"Their life laughs through, and spits at their creed."
If they had practised the charity they professed, there would not now be an old-creed Jew in the world."
F. Chevreuse saw how vain it would be to combat the man in his present mood, and he strongly suspected what trouble lay at the bottom of it. Had he been less truly charitable, he might have persuaded himself that it was his duty to make a counter attack or a convincing argument—a mistake sometimes made by people who like to think that they are zealously indignant because God's truth is assailed, when, in reality, there may be a good deal of personal feeling because some one has spoken lightly of their belief. F. Chevreuse made neither this mistake nor that other of throwing away argument on an excited man. The end he sought was the glory of God in the conversion of souls; and if, to accomplish that, it had been necessary for him to stand, like his divine Master, "opening not his lips," while truth was reviled, he would have done it.
"I am a better Jew than you are, then," he said gently, and put his arm in Mr. Schöninger's, who, in the surprise at this unexpected tone, did not shrink from him. "I am proud of that ancient people of God. In the morning of humanity, it was the pillar of cloud which was to give place to the pillar of fire at the gloaming of the race. To me, all the glorious points in their history are literally true. Moses wears his two beams of light; the bush burns without being consumed; at the stroke of a rod, water gushes from the rock, or is piled up in a wall—it is literally true, not a figure. But the sacrifice was above all. Those poor exiles from Eden were deprived of present happiness; but they were full of knowledge, and comforted by hope. They were but just from the hand of the Creator, and were more perfect in mind and body than any since. They had spoken face to face with God. He condemned them for their sin, but promised them a Redeemer, and gave them the sacrifice as a sign. I have always thought that there was something very touching in the sacrifice which Cain and Abel offered up. They were commemorating the sin of their own parents. Then, see how wonderfully that idea of an offended God demanding a propitiatory sacrifice clung to the human mind! The universality of the belief would prove its truth, if there were no other proof. How it must have been branded on the souls of Adam and Eve to last so! The race grew, and broke into fragments that scattered far and wide. For centuries they never met, and they lost all memory of each other. Their habits and their languages changed; the faces of some grew dark; there was scarcely a sign of brotherhood between them. If they met, they were as strange to each other as the inhabitants of different planets. Some adored one God, some believed in many. In spiritual matters, there was only one point which they held in common. You have, perhaps, seen the little Agnus Dei that Catholics wear—a bit of wax with a lamb stamped on it. Well, sir, every soul that God sent into the world had the sacrificial idea stamped on it, like that lamb on the wax. The devil blurred this image, of course, till men fell into all sorts of errors, and even sacrificed each other; but he could never efface it. The hand of God graves deeply, and the inscription wears out the hand that rubs it.
"But the Jews, my sublime spiritual ancestors, kept the truth. They adored the one God, Jehovah; and by their sacrifice they were perpetually reminding him of the Redeemer he had promised them. It is true, they became corrupted, and rejected him when he came; but I do not forget that he was a Jew, that his first followers were Jews, and that his Immaculate Mother was a Jewess. I tell you, I glory in the history of that people. It is you who throw contempt on them, not I. Catholicism proves and honors Judaism. If all were false, we might then be deluded; but the Jews would be the deluders. We only complain of them because they call themselves liars. Judaism, past and present, would fall with Catholicism, and fall underneath. All the truth held by the reformed Jews is a weak reflection of the light cast by the Catholic Church back on old Judaism. To deny the authority of the church is as though the moon should proclaim herself the source of day, and try to extinguish the sun. If it were possible for the attempt to succeed, the result would be an utter spiritual darkness, followed by barbarism. Christ is the light of the world; and all the light there was in the world before his coming was like the morning light before the sun touches the horizon. The patriarchs and the prophets were the planets and the moon of the spiritual system; they saw him afar off, and told of him. Strange inconsistency! Men usually laugh at prophecies till they are fulfilled, then pay them a retrospective homage; but in this, they bow to the prophecy till the instant of its fulfilment, then reject and scorn both together. If you believed in Christ, all your altars would blaze up again, making a spiral circle of fire from the creation to the redemption. He rounds the circle. 'I am the beginning and the end,' he says."