How different would have been the organization of the expedition, how far different its results, if the church had still owned England's heart, and her statesmen had been Catholics! The most worldly and ill-living of such would not have dreamed of equipping a colony without making full provision for the celebration of Christian worship and the ministrations of the church. It would have been their first care. Had they designed to make the colony subservient to the noble object of reforming those unfortunates whom society had cast out of its pale, nothing would have been advertently left undone to bring all the salutary influences of religion to bear upon them, and to place at their service every one of its supernatural aids. What is the church, in her actual working in the affairs of men, but a divinely organized reformatory system? Now a fundamental principle of that system is that forgiven crime is buried out of sight and out of mind. When the minister of the divine pardon [pg 766] has opened the doors of the eternal prison, and has stricken off the deadly fetters from the self-condemning penitent, he who was just now kneeling at his side in bonds and death, together with all the crimes he has committed, are alike forgotten by him. He is to him quite a new and other man. And with the Christian benediction he sends him forth reinvested with the royalty of his birth and his consanguinity to God, to mingle, mayhap, if he correspond to the grace given, with the most virtuous on the earth, as though he had never broken its peace or given scandal to his brethren. Men are what their religion makes them. And no Catholic statesman would have sent out a convict colony to a distant shore without providing for such as would be reformed a destination where the past might be at once forgotten and repaired. The angels of the Gospel, inflamed with the noblest charity that ever dawned over the everlasting hills on an ice-bound world, would have been scarcely ever absent from the prison cells, never weary of importuning their inmates to save themselves, and to reclaim their place amongst their fellows by a reformation which would at the same time restore them to their hopes as immortal men. Far from permitting to them every license of lust, and the indulgence of every criminal passion which did not interfere with jail discipline; by their moral reformation, and by it alone, would they have attempted their reformation as citizens. They would have been ever at hand to aid them with priestly counsels and the supernatural grace of the sacraments in those frequent falls and relapses of which nearly every history of reformation consists. And those who were sufficiently reformed to be able to conform thenceforth to the easy standard of public virtue would have found, in the new career to which they were committed, precisely the same divine system, with its supernatural aids and exhaustless charities ready to carry on in their behalf the work of restoration, through the love of man, to the reward of God.
Even in the case of those pitiable beings, in whose crime-clogged souls the loving accents of religion appeared to awake no echoes, never would the indiscriminating and wholesale torture of the lash have been summoned to its unholy and brutalizing work to deepen still more their moral degradation and place their reformation for ever out of hope. Restrained as they were from doing further mischief to society, the church, whose heart, as of a human mother, yearns with most fondness towards the most vicious of her children, would never have abandoned, still less have ill-treated, the poor outcasts. She would have hoped against hope. Nor would she for one moment have ceased her importunities, her ministrations, and her prayers, until final impenitence had taken away the unhappy beings for ever from the counsels of mercy, or human obduracy had capitulated, at the hour of death, to the exhaustless love of God.
The Veil Withdrawn.
Translated, By Permission, From The French Of Mme. Craven, Author Of “A Sister's Story,” “Fleurange,” Etc.
XXXIX.
The following day Lando, at an unusually early hour, entered the little sitting-room next my chamber where I commonly remained in the morning. He looked so much graver than usual that I thought he had come to tell me there was some obstacle in the way of his matrimonial prospects. But it was once more of my affairs, and not of his, he wished to speak.
“Dear cousin,” said he without any preamble, “I come at this unusual hour because I wish to see you alone. I have something important to tell you.”
“Something that concerns you, Lando?”
“No, it concerns you and Lorenzo.”