which, under the Regency, desecrated the tomb of Deacon Paris.  Then Bonjour had an affair with a woman and she claimed to be big with the prophet Elijah, who, according to the Apocalypse, is to precede the last arrival of Christ.  This child came into the world, then there was a second who was none other than the Paraclete.  The latter did business as a woolen merchant in Paris, was a colonel in the National Guard under Louis-Philippe, and died in easy circumstances in 1866.  A tradesman Paraclete, a Redeemer with epaulettes and gold braid!

“In 1886 one Dame Brochard of Vouvray affirmed to whoever would listen that Jesus was reincarnate in her.  In 1889 a pious madman named David published at Angers a brochure entitled The Voice of God, in which he assumed the modest appellation of ’only Messiah of the Creator Holy Ghost,’ and informed the world that he was a sewer contractor and wore a beard a yard and a half long.  At the present moment his throne is not empty for want of successors.  An engineer named Pierre Jean rode all over the Mediterranean provinces on horseback announcing that he was the Holy Ghost.  In Paris, Berard, an omnibus conductor on the Pantheon-Courcelles line, likewise asserts that he incorporates the Paraclete, while a magazine article avers that the hope of Redemption has dawned in the person of the poet Jhouney.  Finally, in America, from time to time, women claim to be Messiahs, and they recruit adherents among persons worked up to fever pitch by Advent revivals.”

“They are no worse than the people who deny God and Creation,” said Carhaix.  “God is immanent in His creatures.  He is their Life principle, the source of movement, the foundation of existence, says Saint Paul.  He has His personal existence, being the ‘I AM,’ as Moses says.

“The Holy Ghost, through Christ in glory, will be immanent in all beings.  He will be the principle which transforms and regenerates them, but there is no need for him to be incarnate.  The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father through the Son.  He is sent to act, not to materialize himself.  It is downright madness to maintain the contrary, thus falling into the heresies of the Gnostics and the Fratricelli, into the errors of Dulcin de Novare and his wife Marguerite, into the filth of abbe Beccarelli, and the abominations of Segarelli of Parma, who, on pretext of becoming a child the better to symbolize the simple, naif love of the Paraclete, had himself diapered and slept on the breast of a nurse.”

“But,” said Durtal, “you haven’t made yourself quite clear to me.  If I understand you, the Holy Ghost will act by an infusion into us.  He will transmute us, renovate our souls by a sort of ’passive purgation’—­to drop into the theological vernacular.”

“Yes, he will purify us soul and body.”

“How will he purify our bodies?”