’The Church would allow me, no doubt, to pick up a living as best I could, and would not interfere with me till I said something or wrote something that the Church thought would lessen its power; then the cry of unfrocked priest would be raised against me, and calumny, the great ecclesiastical weapon, would be used.  I do not know what my future life will be:  my past has been so beset with misfortune that, once I reach the other side, I shall never look back.  I cannot find words to tell you of the impatience with which I wait the summer-time, the fifteenth of July, when the moon will be full.  I cannot think what would have happened to me if I had stayed at home the afternoon that the curlew was shot; something would have happened, for we cannot go on always sacrificing ourselves.  We can sacrifice ourselves for a time, but we cannot sacrifice ourselves all our life long, unless we begin to take pleasure in the immolation of self, and then it is no longer sacrifice.  Something must have happened, or I should have gone mad.

’I had suffered so much in the parish.  I think the places in which we have suffered become distasteful to us, and the instinct to wander takes us.  A migratory bird goes, or dies of home-sickness; home is not always where we are born—­it is among ideas that are dear to us:  and it is exile to live among people who do not share our ideas.  Something must have happened to me.  I can think of nothing except suicide or what did happen, for I could never have made up my mind to give pain to the poor people and to leave a scandalous name behind; still less could I continue to administer Sacraments that I ceased to believe in.  I can imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments.  A very abject life it is to murmur Absolve te over the heads of parishioners, and to place wafers on their tongues, when we have ceased to believe that we have power to forgive sins and to turn biscuits into God.  A layman may have doubts, and continue to live his life as before, without troubling to take the world into his confidence, but a priest may not.  The priest is a paid agent and the money an unbelieving priest receives, if he be not inconceivably hardened in sin, must be hateful to him, and his conscience can leave him no rest.

’At first I used to suspect my conversion, and began to think it unseemly that a man should cease to believe that we must renounce this life in order to gain another, without much preliminary study of the Scriptures; I began to look upon myself as a somewhat superficial person whose religious beliefs yielded before the charm of a pretty face and winsome personality, but this view of the question no longer seems superficial.  I believe now that the superficial ones are those who think that it is only in the Scriptures that we may discover whether we have a right to live.  Our belief in books rather than in Nature is one of humanity’s most curious characteristics, and a very irreligious one, it seems to me; and I am glad to think that it was your sunny face that raised up my crushed instincts, that brought me back to life, and ever since you have been associated in my mind with the sun and the spring-tide.