In a town like Crichton such a death for such a cause would create a deep impression; and crowds stood all about the cottage when the friends who were admitted came out from its doors, and a grave silence prevailed in all the streets as they passed through them.
It was Good Friday; and that evening, for the first time, the new organist was to take charge of the choir in the Immaculate Conception. There was but little to do, for the singers were not in training—only a hymn or two to sing before the sermon, and nothing after.
Mr. Schöninger was glad that he should thus be able to leave the church before the sermon without seeming disrespectful to F. Chevreuse, as he would have seemed in going out and coming in again when the sermon was over. He had not the least objection to hearing Catholic sermons, provided they did not bore him—had, indeed, heard many of them; but he did not wish to hear F. Chevreuse speak on the passion and death of Christ. To him, that had always been the weakest point in the Christian theology. He could reverence almost to the verge of adoration the sublime humility and sweetness and patience of that life which they called divine; but he shrank from the agony which crowned it as something weak and unfitting. A life so perfect ending thus was to him incongruous; as though the eye, travelling up a lofty and exquisite column, should see a rude block at the top instead of a perfect capital.
“If it does not prove the falsehood of the whole,” Mr. Schöninger said to himself, “it proves a great mistake somewhere; and I would rather not hear such a man as F. Chevreuse try to make it seem reasonable.”
But he would not be in too great a hurry to go. He lingered a little, arranged the music, and stopped at the door of the choir long enough to hear the priest announce his text: The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquities of us all.
“My Isaiah!” he thought. “I wonder what he meant in writing that?”
“Good Friday is, to my mind, not so much a day of sorrow as a day of remorse,” the priest began. “The Jews were ungrateful, and we are ungrateful.”
“That dear, just soul!” Mr. Schöninger muttered with a smile, as he went slowly out.
Going down the stairs, he caught now and then a sentence. “We sin, and are forgiven, and then we sin again; and we sin against a God whom we acknowledge; they sinned against a God in whom they did not believe.”
And again: “Peter sinned once, but he never denied his Master a second time; Magdalene was once a sinner, but never again.”