“Margaret,” said Sir Thomas, “have compassion on your father!”
She then said no more, and they sat in silence, she with her arms clasped around his neck. She wept, and the tears continued to course slowly down her cheeks, whilst the lamp she had brought cast a feeble glimmer of light throughout the lengthy apartment, and over the rows of books arranged on the shelves; and thus the hours fled rapidly toward the fatal moment which she saw advancing with an agony indescribable.
O wicked and voluptuous prince! raise your head from your bed of down, draw aside the triple draperies of silk and gold that surround you; for your crimes keep vigil around your couch, and the justice of God numbers every tear you have caused to be shed! Far better would it be for you to sleep on an infected dunghill, in some obscure retreat; that your limbs, weary with toil and the heat of the mid-day sun, should tremble beneath the frosts of night, and that your hands were pure and free from iniquity in the presence of the most high God; for we cannot believe that man oppresses man without justice being meted out to him, or that the weak shall remain the prey of the strong. The day will come when a terrible vengeance shall fall upon the head of the impious, and he will see arrayed before him all the crimes he has committed. Then shall he cry aloud: “Why have I ever lived, and why has my mother ever borne me in her womb?” But light then will no longer be measured, night will have disappeared, century will no more follow century, and time shall be no more.
TO BE CONTINUED
[209] Margarita, Anglicè Margaret, is the Latin word for daisy.—”Transl.
A PROTESTANT BISHOP ON CONFESSION.
BY A CATHOLIC LAYMAN.
Bishop Atkinson, of North Carolina, in a “Charge” to the clergy of his diocese, took occasion to inveigh against auricular confession. To this Bishop Gibbons replied. The Protestant prelate now appears in “A Defence,” the purport of which we propose here to examine. Omitting any comment on the personal retort, we make our first quotation from the eighth page of this pamphlet: