“Yes, oh yes, I see,” murmured the girl, with a grieving face. “Are they always to blame for it? They must be induced, sometimes, to enter the church before they’ve seriously thought about it, and then don’t know how to escape from the path that has been marked out for them from their childhood. Should you think such a priest as that was to blame for being a skeptic?” she asked very earnestly.
“No,” said Ferris, with a smile at her seriousness, “I should think such a skeptic as that was to blame for being a priest.”
“Shouldn’t you be very sorry for him?” pursued Florida still more solemnly.
“I should, indeed, if I liked him. If I didn’t, I’m afraid I shouldn’t,” said Ferris; but he saw that his levity jarred upon her. “Come, Miss Vervain, you’re not going to look at those fat monks and sleek priests in the procession to-morrow as so many incorporate tragedies, are you? You’ll spoil my pleasure if you do. I dare say they’ll be all of them devout believers, accepting everything, down to the animalcula in the holy water.”
“If you were that kind of a priest,” persisted the girl, without heeding his jests, “what should you do?”
“Upon my word, I don’t know. I can’t imagine it. Why,” he continued, “think what a helpless creature a priest is in everything but his priesthood—more helpless than a woman, even. The only thing he could do would be to leave the church, and how could he do that? He’s in the world, but he isn’t of it, and I don’t see what he could do with it, or it with him. If an Italian priest were to leave the church, even the liberals, who distrust him now, would despise him still more. Do you know that they have a pleasant fashion of calling the Protestant converts apostates? The first thing for such a priest would be exile. But I’m not supposably the kind of priest you mean, and I don’t think just such a priest supposable. I dare say if a priest found himself drifting into doubt, he’d try to avoid the disagreeable subject, and, if he couldn’t, he’d philosophize it some way, and wouldn’t let his skepticism worry him.”
“Then you mean that they haven’t consciences like us?”
“They have consciences, but not like us. The Italians are kinder people than we are, but they’re not so just, and I should say that they don’t think truth the chief good of life. They believe there are pleasanter and better things. Perhaps they’re right.”
“No, no; you don’t believe that, you know you don’t,” said Florida, anxiously. “And you haven’t answered my question.”
“Oh yes, I have. I’ve told you it wasn’t a supposable case.”