He Intimated Or Insinuated That
He Had Long Been Troubled With Certain Scruples, That His Conscience
Demanded A Little More Liberty Than His Church Would Allow Its
Followers, And This Had Caused Him To Cast A Wistful Eye On That Other
Church Whose Followers Were, Alas!
Accorded a little more liberty than
was perhaps good for their souls.
But he didn't know, and in any case
he would like to correspond on these important matters with one on the
other side. This letter met with a warm response, and there was much
correspondence and meetings with other clerics-Anglican or
Episcopalian, I forget which. But there were also Presbyterians,
Lutherans, and Methodist ministers, all with churches of their own in
the town, and he may have flirted a little with all of them. Then he
came for his year of waiting to us, during which he amused himself by
teaching the little ones, smoothing the way for my mathematical
brother, and fishing. But the authorities of the church had not got
rid of him; they heard not infrequently from him, and it was not
pleasant hearing. He had come, he told them, a Roman Catholic priest
to a Roman Catholic country, and had found himself a stranger in a
strange land. He had waited patiently for months, and had been put off
with idle promises or thrust aside, while every greedy pushing priest
that arrived from Spain and Italy was received with open arms and a
place provided for him. Then, when his patience and private means had
been exhausted, he had accidently been thrown among those who were not
of the Faith, yet had received him with open arms. He had been
humiliated and pained at the disinterested hospitality and Christian
charity shown to him by those outside the pale, after the treatment he
had received from his fellow-priests.
Probably he said more than this: for it is a fact that he had been
warmly invited to preach in one or two of the Protestant churches in
the town. He did not go so far as to accept that offer: he was wise in
his generation, and eventually got his reward.
Our schoolmaster gone, we were once more back in the old way; we did
just what we liked. Our parents probably thought that our life would
be on the plains, with sheep and cattle-breeding for only vocations,
and that should any one of us, like my mathematical-minded brother,
take some line of his own, he would find out the way of it for
himself: his own sense, the light of nature, would be his guide. I had
no inclination to do anything with books myself: books were lessons,
therefore repellent, and that any one should read a book for pleasure
was inconceivable. The only attempt to improve our minds at this
period came, oddly enough, from my masterful brother who despised our
babyish intellects - especially mine. However, one day he announced
that he had a grand scheme to put before us.
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