It was not as if she were uttering a belief—whether Jesus Christ was God she did not know; she was not even thinking about it then. But it was as if she had grasped a link in a mighty chain, which, if one other link could be supplied, would solve and settle all doubt for ever. Over and over she said the words, fearing to lose or forget them: “Jesus Christ—God—ascended into heaven, and he had a heart like ours, and he had a mother.” If this was true, how God in heaven must pity her, how he must love her!
And suddenly the tears were falling on Rose’s cheeks. When she had wept last she could not tell; certainly not since Ellen Lawton’s death, though she had often craved the relief of tears. Now they fell softly and plenteously, while she kept repeating the strange formula with a keen sense that it soothed her and she was resting; and oh! she had been so tired. A mother, a mother—how very sweet it must be to have a mother! And a God with a heart like ours, a heart that could be wounded and bleed and suffer sorely; oh! how one must love a God like that.
“John,” she said abruptly, when they were sitting by the study-lamp after tea, “what are Catholics? I mean, what do you know about them?”
“Not much of anything,” he answered in some surprise, “except as one is always coming upon them in history and the papers. Why?”
“What makes them different from Protestants? Aren’t you always coming upon them too?”
“Not in the same way, child. You know that Protestants are not so—so obtrusive.”
“But why, John? I want to know about them.”
There was an animation in her manner which reminded him of old times; he saw that she was really in earnest, and set himself to answer her in his straightforward, kindly way, glad to notice any change for the better in her tone of mind.
“I have never thought very much about them, Rose,” he said; “but every general reader must come in contact with them somehow, even if, like me, he has not had personal acquaintance with them in society. Of course you know the distinguishing features of confession and transubstantiation, the papacy, the worship of saints and relics, prayer for the dead.”
“Are you sure they are all wrong?”