“You know that what I say is true,” he continued in quieter but no less intensely passionate accents—­“You know that every day sees our Master crowned with new thorns and exposed to fresh torture!  You know that we do nothing!—­We stand beside Him in His second agony as dumb as though we were unconscious of it!  You know that we might speak and will not!  You know that we fear the ephemera of temporary governments, policies, and social conventionalities, more than the great, real, and terrible judgment of the world to come!”

“But all these things have been said before,” began the Archbishop, recovering a little from the confusion that had momentarily seized him,—­“And as I just now observed, you should remember that there have always been heretics from the very beginning.”

“Oh, I remember!” and the Cardinal sighed, “How is it possible that any of us should forget!  Heretics, whom we have tortured with unheard-of agonies and burned in the flames, as a proof of our love and sympathy with the tenderness of Christ Jesus!”

“You are going too far back in time!” said the Archbishop quickly.  “We erred in the beginning through excess of zeal, but now—­now—­”

“Now we do exactly the same thing,” returned Bonpre—­“Only we do not burn physically our heretics, but morally.  We condemn all who oppose us.  Good men and brave thinkers, whom in our arrogance we consign to eternal damnation, instead of endeavouring to draw out the heart of their mystery, and gather up the gems of their learning as fresh proofs of the active presence of God’s working in, and through all things!  Think of the Church’s invincible and overpowering obstinacy in the case of Galileo!  He declared the existence of God to us by the utterance of a Truth,—­inasmuch as every truth is a new message from God.  Had he pronounced his theories before our divine Master, that Master would have confirmed, not denied them!  Have we one single example of Christ putting to the torture any poor soul that did not believe in Him?  Nay—­He Himself submitted to be tortured; but for those who wronged Him, His prayer was only—­’Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  They know not what they do!  The ministers of truth should rather suffer themselves than let others suffer.  The horrors of the Inquisition are a blot on religious history; our Master never meant us to burn and torture men into faith.  He desired us to love and lead them into the way of life as the shepherd leads a flock into the fold.  I repeat again, there would have been no room for atheism if we—­we—­the servants of Christ, had been strictly true to our vocation.”

By this time the Archbishop had recovered his equanimity.  He sat down and surveyed the up-standing figure of the Cardinal with curiosity and a touch of pity.

“You think too much of these things,” he said soothingly—­“You are evidently overwrought with study and excessive zeal.  Much that you say may be true; nevertheless the Church—­our Church—­stands firm among overwhelming contradictions,—­and we, its ministers, do what we can.  I myself am disposed to think that the multitude of the saved is greater than the multitude of the lost.”