“He had, agra, forty miles out in Vermont; but sure he could not refuse going.  The woman is just dying; and besides, she is a Protestant, who wants to die in the faith.”

“Happy for her,” said Norry, “if he overtakes her alive.  How good the priests are to these Yankees, although they are always ridiculing the clergy; yet, if one of them is going to die, the priest not only forgives them, but is willing to travel any distance to do them a service.”

“Sure that’s the orders of God and the church,” said Mrs. Doherty.  “It is not for them alone they are working, but for God, you know.”

“That’s true,” said Norry.  “But still and all, when one hears how they are always ridiculing priests and nuns, and sees how they hate our religion, it is very hard, I think, to forgive them.”

“Yes, agra,” said Peggy, who was better informed than Norry; “so it is hard for flesh and blood to forgive the heretics; but, unless we forgive them, God won’t forgive us.  The priest knows this well; and so, if there were two sick calls to come at one time to him, as happened lately, one a Protestant and the other a Catholic, he would go to the Protestant first.”

“That beats all,” said Norry, “and is more than I would do, if I were the priest; for I know well all that is said of him behind his back.”

“What harm will all that scandalous talk do the priest?” said Peggy.  “It only does him good; and he has a blessing for being ‘spoken evil of’ like our Lord.  He forgives all those whom God forgives; and so, if his enemy, the Protestant, falls sick, and wants his services, he goes to him first, in order that he may be brought into the church, where alone he can be saved.”

“Thanks be to God,” said Norry.  “Is not it a wonder the Protestants don’t understand this, and look on the priests and the church as their best friends, seeing that the priests are as ready, and readier, to attend to them than to the Catholics themselves?”

“How can they understand it when they are blinded by love of money, impurity, and the hatred that the ministers excite against the church in the minds of their hearers?  Wasn’t our Lord himself hated by those whom he most loved, and put to death by them?  It is so with every priest who follows his steps, now as well as then.  The world will always hate good.”

This Christian philosophy was a little too sublime for poor Norry’s mind, who was a long time among the Yankees, sufficiently instructed in the customs of this “free country” to be ready to observe the law of “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life;” and who, besides, had her naturally warm temper rather spoiled from her continual rencontres with her mistress on such subjects as confession, priests’ celibacy, purgatory, and other subjects too profound for the understanding of her mistress to know any thing about them, and too sacred in the eyes of Norry to allow them to be irreverently handled without saying something in their defence.  It requires not only a perfect acquaintance with the sublime and heavenly tenets of Catholicity to speak of them with precision and propriety, but, in addition to a deep study of the truths of true religion, the practice of her precepts, and the frequent reception of the sacraments, are necessary to imbue the mind with the true Christian notions regarding her high commands.