Marcel, indeed, belonged to that younger generation of the clergy which believes that everything which alienates the Church from new ideas, brings it nearer to its ruin.  And the day when the foolish Pius IX presumed to proclaim and define, to the great joy of free-thinkers and the enemies of Catholicism, the ridiculous dogma of the Immaculate Conception in the presence of two hundred dumb complaisant prelates, on that day he experienced profound grief.  According to his ideas this was the severest blow which had been inflicted on the foundations of the Church for centuries.

He had studied theology deeply, but he had not confined himself to the letter; he believed he saw something beyond.

—­The letter killeth, he said, the spirit giveth life.

—­The spirit giveth life when it is wholesome and pure, the Grand-Vicar answered him with a smile, but is it healthy in a young man who believes himself to be wiser than his elders?

Marcel then without mistrust and urged by questions, developed his theories.  He believed in the absolute equality of men before God, in the transmutation of souls:  and the resurrection of the flesh seemed to him the utmost absurdity.  He quite thought that there were future rewards and penalties, but he had too much faith in the goodness of God to suppose that the expiation could be eternal.  He allied himself in that to the Universalists, who were, he said, the most reasonable sect of American Protestantism.

—­Reasonable! reasonable! repeated the Grand-Vicar scoffingly; in truth, my poor friend, you make me doubt your reason.  Can there be anything reasonable in the turpitude of heresy?

Then he hurried to find the Bishop: 

—­I have emptied our young man’s bag, he said to him.  Do you know,
Monseigneur, what there was at the bottom?

—­Oh, oh.  Has he been inclined to debauchery?  He is so young.

—­Would to heaven it were only that, Monseigneur.  But it is a hundred times worse.

—­What do you tell me?  Must I fear then for all my little sheep?  We must look after him then.

—­I repeat, Monseigneur, that that would be nothing....  It is the abomination of abomination, a whole world of turpitude, heresies in embryo.

—­Heresies!  Oh, oh!  That is serious.

—­Heresies which would make the cursed shades of John Huss, Wickliffe,
Luther and Calvin himself tremble, if they appeared again.

—­What do you say?

—­I tell you, Monseigneur, that you have warmed a viper in your bosom.

—­Ah, well, I will drive out this wicked viper.

The Bishop, who kept two nieces in the episcopal seraglio, would willingly have pardoned his secretary if he had been accused of immorality, but he could not carry his condescension so far as heresy.  He wanted, however, to assure himself personally, and as Marcel was incapable of lying, he quickly recognized the sad reality.