full confession;—­by publicly branding himself in the sight of that society in whose estimation he had till then seemed something superior,—­by voluntarily resigning himself to the wrath of the Church of which he was a professed servant.  Cursed by his Creed, he may now perchance be blessed by his Creator!  For he died, clean-souled and true—­washed of hypocrisy,—­with no secret vice left unhidden for others to rake up and expose to criticism.  Whatsoever wrong he did, he openly admitted—­whatever false things he said, he retracted.  I believe—­and I am sure we all believe, that his spirit thus purified, is acceptable to God.  He has left no lies behind him—­no debts—­no wrongs to be avenged.  He told you all, people of Paris, what he was before he left you,—­and, looking down into this dark grave, we know what he is.  A senseless, sightless, stiffening form of clay, from which the soul that animated it into action has fled.  Let the Church excommunicate this poor corpse of my father,—­let it muster its forces against his memory as it will, I swear before you all, that memory shall live!  Yes—­for I, his son, will guard it; I whom he so late acknowledged as his own flesh and blood, will be a shield of defence for his name till I die!  If priests would attack him, they must attack him through me!—­and I, despite a thousand Churches, a thousand Creeds, a thousand Sacraments, will firmly maintain that a man who frankly repents his sins and is openly honest with the world before he leaves it, is a better Christian than he, who for the sake of mere appearances and conventionality, juggles with death and passes to his Maker’s presence in a black cloud of lies!  Better to be crucified with Christ, than live with the High Priests and Pharisees of the modern Jerusalem of our social conditions!  Truth may seem to perish on the Cross of injustice—­it may be buried in a sealed sepulchre, the entrance to which may be closed up by a great stone of Mammon-bulk and heaviness—­but the moment must come when the Angel descends from Heaven—­when the stone is rolled away—­and the eternal, living God rises again and walks the world in the glory of a new dawn!”

He ended—­and for a moment there was a deep silence.  There had been no funeral service, for no priest would attend the burial of the heretic Abbe.  So, after a brief pause, Cyrillon knelt down by the grave,—­and carried away by the solemnity of the scene, as well as by their own emotional excitement, more than half the crowd knelt with him, as, bending his head reverently over his clasped hands, he prayed aloud—­

“Oh God of Love, whose tenderness and care for Thy creation is everywhere disclosed to us, from the smallest atom of dust, to the stupendous majesty of Thy million worlds in the air,—­give we beseech Thee, to this perished clay which once was man, the beauty which transforms vile things to virtuous, and endows our seeming death with life!  Let Thy eternal Law of Resurrection so work upon this senseless