Then the father, roused out of his half-hopeful state as to her difficulties, and out of his hitherto so sweet reliance upon her kindred strength, turned to the dogmatic aspect of his faith, and prayed fervently that the Lord would open his child's eyes once more, and draw her in out of the cold desert where her soul wandered, a shivering stranger. But, alas! those apparently clear-cut arguments, those knife-like dogmas, so trenchant, so uncompromising, those technicalities of crystallized religion, so satisfying to the old exiles and first settlers of New England, fell unheeded on the ear of Grace, who, had she believed them, would have been as competent a teacher of them as her own father, as far as her thorough knowledge of their slightest details went. Mr. Seymour was trying to do God's work; he was trying to create, to give life to a lifeless organization, to put a quivering human soul into a shapely but ice-cold form.
Grace had once said she did not want example nor personal experience, but clear, frigid demonstration. She was right as to the seeming want in her soul—the want of absolute, incontrovertible truth; she was wrong as to the fire from heaven, which was her real want—the purely personal gift of faith, direct from God, which only can descend and strike the waiting soul as a sacrifice, and enkindle it for ever, no more to be extinguished by error or by doubt.
Another year passed, and things were unchanged. No, not unchanged, for Mr. Seymour, in his great anxiety to bring his daughter back to the old belief in which he and his ever-remembered wife had been so carefully reared, had explored hitherto sealed books and commentaries in the vain hope that, since none of the old arguments touched her, some newly suggested ones might. He did not expect to find anything in these works which would strike him as either proving or disproving his settled belief; still, he thought chance might throw into his hands some demonstration that would have the desired effect upon Grace. She seemed to be inclined to magnify beyond his utmost powers of toleration the absolute independence and free will of man; she proudly took her stand on human reason, insisting that if there were a creative God, and if it were really he who had given reason to man, it followed that this regal gift must be allowed full play in determining the object of faith. His Calvinism rebelled and retreated to its old entrenchments, denouncing reason as the natural enemy of faith, as an inventive principle ever actively evil and godless. But he once read in a work of one of the "great" reformers these strange and somewhat coarse words:
"The devil's sole occupation is to get the Romish priests to measure God's will in his works, with reason."
He was staggered. He searched his book-shelves for some work of Catholic theology. As he was passing his hand along the volumes, and running his eye down their titles, the little, dusty book we have mentioned fell down. He picked it up, and, looking at it carelessly, saw its name, Catechism of the Council of Trent. Curiosity at once made him forget the first motive of his expedition among the books, and he sat down to examine the newly-found volume. By and by he got interested, and from page to page his eyes ran eagerly, now sparkling with defiance, now widening in astonishment, and anon his brow contracting with intense earnestness, as clear dogmas revealed themselves from out the ancient text—dogmas directly opposite to his own, it is true, yet at every moment appealing to rational and unbiassed human nature.
Here man was represented as a grand monument of God's glory, a being worth redemption in the eyes of God, a creature endowed with intellectual gifts to lead him rationally towards faith and virtue, even as he was provided with feet to carry him to the clear mountain-spring, and with hands wherewith to till the yielding, fruitful soil. Here he beheld a humanity not degraded to brutishness by the fall, but redeemable through the very qualities God's grace had yet left to it; here he saw reconciled man's dignity and God's majesty; here, in a word, a religion which, claiming to be divine, was consequently not afraid to acknowledge and to guide the good tendencies whose very humanness put them beyond the pale of competition with herself. Mr. Seymour had always been taught to adhere to the Bible as the one infallible rock of salvation; he now saw the Bible merged into a system he had once called idolatrous, but could not at present stigmatize as such. He determined to read the Bible from the point of view of the Council of Trent, for pure intellectual curiosity's sake, he said to himself. Alone and almost hiding from his daughter's still hopeless but always eager inquiries, he began this study, with what result would be almost useless to mention. The Council of Trent had seemed plausible when studied by itself; but when referred to the book he had always called the rule of faith, this council was irrefutable. Could he have been mistaken all his lifetime? could it be that God had purposely left him in ignorance so long? Or was not his belief at least as good as the faith of the Council of Trent? But then came his clear philosophical training to the rescue; for, it said, how can contradictory axioms both be true? Hitherto he had unhesitatingly held the Catholic doctrines to be intrinsically, nay blasphemously untrue, and it followed that his own, their direct contradictories, must be right; but if, upon examination, the reverse was evidently the case, then his former opinions—for doctrines he could no longer call them—must be radically, irredeemably false. One day he spoke to Grace about it, and was surprised at the calm manner in which she received a communication whose mere rudiments had been such a shock to him. To her mind, this curious development of her father's researches was a really interesting study, quite apart from its religious bearing, and considered principally as a logical passe-temps. But to her father it was a heart-stirring reality, which he pursued with all the hitherto pent-up passion that his cold creed had forced to run in such narrow channels. Once he said to his child:
"Grace, I used to believe the Bible was the only rule of faith; but I never saw that the Bible presupposed a church, a heaven-ordained society to shelter it from the conflicting explanations and interpolations of men; presupposed, also, a willing obedience on the part of the faithful to believe it as it is written, not a desire to shrink from its plain teachings and explain away its doctrines. How could we, without a church to interpret it to us, be sure that we were not following some far-fetched human adaptation of its teaching, or pandering to some cowardly modification of its code of morals? No; the Bible presupposes the church, and, without it, would be more of a dead letter than the Hebrew is a dead language."
Grace was silent, and wondered. Her own feelings were as unsettled as ever, but she tried to live less in her own hopeless struggle than in the noble, fruitful, self-forgetting life that was dawning for her father. As his convictions grew deeper and took stronger root, his anxiety for his child waxed more and more terrible. Would the grace of God that had come to him through the yellow pages of an old book never touch her with its rod of power? Had reason no influence on her logical-seeming mind, had sentiment no power on her undoubtedly loving heart? She went about her self-imposed duties as usual, bringing consolation wherever she went, cheering others with words that were powerless to cheer her own heart, kind and considerate to the poor, amiable to all. Her father, smitten with dread as to her bodily as well as spiritual welfare, asked himself how he could expose her at this moment to the poverty that must result from the only step he knew he ought to take. To leave Walcot as a convert meant to throw himself and his children—Grace especially—into the most absolute penury. He could endure it, George would hardly feel it, but his daughter, brave and affectionate as she was, could her shattered heart bear up under so unexpected a necessity? So he cheated himself and hesitated yet; but the evil spirit was to be defeated soon. God could not allow his returning son and no longer blinded servant to wander long in human weakness outside the holy fold.
Grace was sitting at a reading-desk in her father's library one Sunday evening in June, the purple sunset streaming in and giving the lilacs a deeper hue, and the laburnums a more burnished shade, when a young man swung open the garden gate, and, with free and unfettered step, almost ran up to the house-door.