“The music in the Cathedral may have been my fancy,” he said,—­“But the discord in the world sounds clear and is not imagination.  A casuist in religion may say ’It was to be’;—­that heresies and dissensions were prophesied by Christ, when He said ’Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold’;—­but this does not excuse the Church from the sin of neglect, if any neglects exists.  One thing we have never seemed to thoroughly understand, and this is that Christ’s teaching is God’s teaching, and that it has not stopped with the enunciation of the Gospel.  It is going on even now—­in every fresh discovery of science,—­in every new national experience,—­in everything we can do, or think, or plan, the Divine instruction steadily continues through the Divine influence imparted to us when the Godhead became man, to show men how they might in turn become gods.  This is what we forget and what we are always forgetting; so that instead of accepting every truth, we quarrel with it and reject it, even as Judaea rejected Christ Himself.  It is very strange and cruel;—­and the world’s religious perplexities are neither to be wondered at nor blamed,—­there is just and grave cause for their continuance and increase.”

He closed the Testament, and being thoroughly fatigued in body as well as mind, he at last retired.  Lying down contentedly upon the hard and narrow bed which was the best the inn provided, he murmured his usual prayer,—­“If this should be the sleep of death, Jesus receive my soul!”—­and remained for a little while with his eyes open, looking at the white glory of the moonlight as it poured through his lattice window and formed delicate traceries of silver luminance on the bare wooden floor.  He could just see the dark towers of Notre Dame from where he lay,—­a black mass in the moonbeams—­a monument of half-forgotten history—­a dream of centuries, hallowed or blasphemed by the prayers and aspirations of dead and gone multitudes who had appealed to the incarnate God-in-Man before its altars.  God-in-Man had been made manifest!—­how long would, the world have to wait before Man-in-God was equally created and declared?  For that was evidently intended to be the final triumph of the Christian creed.

“We should have gained such a victory long ago,” mused Cardinal Bonpre—­“only that we ourselves have set up stumbling-blocks, and rejected God at every step of the way.”

Closing his eyes he soon slept; the rays of the moon fell upon his pale face and silvery hair like a visible radiant benediction,—­and the bells of the city chimed the hours loudly and softly, clanging in every direction, without waking him from his rest.  But slumbering as he was, he had no peace,—­for in his sleep he was troubled by a strange vision.

IV.