he was not.  Now the committal of a sin is one thing,—­but the frankly repentant confession of that sin is another.  Some of you will say—­Who am I that I should judge my father?  Why truly I am nothing!—­and should have been nothing but the avenger of my mother’s life and broken-hearted misery.  For that I lived,—­for that I was ready to die!  What a trivial object of existence it must seem to you Parisians nowadays!—­to avenge a mother’s name!  Much better to fight a duel for some paltry dancer!  Yes!—­but I am not so constituted.  From my childhood I worked for two things—­vengeance and ambition; I put ambition second, for I would have sacrificed it all to the fiercer passion.  But when I sought to fulfil my vengeance, the man on whom I would have taken it, himself changed it into respect, pity, admiration, affection,—­and I loved what I had so long hated!  So even I, bent on cruelty, learned to be kind.  But not so the Church!  The Church of Rome cannot forgive the dead priest whom we have laid in all-forgiving Mother Earth to-day!  Had he lived, the sentence of excommunication would have been pronounced against him,—­now that he is dead, it is quite possible it may still be pronounced against his memory.  But what of that?  We who know, who feel, who think,—­we are not led by the Church of Rome, but by the Church of Christ!  The two things are as different as this grave differs from high Heaven!  For we believe that when Magdalen breaks a precious box of perfume at the feet of Christ ‘she hath wrought a good work’.  We also believe that when a man stands ‘afar off’, saying ’Lord, be merciful to me a sinner!’ he goes back to his house again justified more than he who says ‘Lord, I thank Thee I am not as other men!’ We believe that Right is right, and that nothing can make it wrong!  And simply speaking, we know it is right to tell the truth, and wrong to tell a lie.  For a lie is opposed to the working forces of Nature, and those forces sooner or later will attack it and overcome it.  They are beginning now in our swiftly advancing day, to attack the Church of Rome.  And why?  Because its doctrine is no longer that of Christ, but of Mammon!  This is what my father felt and knew, when he addressed his congregation for the last time in Notre Dame de Lorette.  He knew that he was doomed by disease to a speedy death,—­though he little guessed how soon that death would be.  But feeling the premonition of his end, he resolved to speak out,—­not to condone or excuse himself for having preached what he could not believe all those years,—­but merely to tell you how things were with him, and to trust his memory to you to be dealt with as you choose.  He has left a book behind him,—­a book full of great and noble thoughts expressed with most pathetic humility; hence I doubt not that when you see the better soul of him unveiled in his expressed mind, you will yet give him the fame he merits.  His Church judges him a heretic and castaway for having confessed his sin at last to the people whom he so long deceived,—­but I for this, judge him as an honest man!  And I have some little right to my opinion, for as Gys Grandit I have sought to proclaim the thoughts of many—­”