“But is there not,” Odo rejoined, “a divine illumination within each of us, the light of truth which we must follow at any cost—­or have the worst evils and abuses only to take refuge in the Church to find sanctuary there, as malefactors find it?”

The chaplain shook his head.  “It is as I feared,” he said, “and Satan has spread his subtlest snare for you; for if he tempts some in the guise of sensual pleasure, or of dark fears and spiritual abandonment, it is said that to those he most thirsts to destroy he appears in the likeness of their Saviour.  You tell me it is to right the wrongs of the poor and the humble that your new friends, the philosophers, have assailed the authority of Christ.  I have only one answer to make:  Christ, as you said just now, died for the poor—­how many of your philosophers would do as much?  Because men hunger and thirst, is that a sign that He has forsaken them?  And since when have earthly privileges been the token of His favour?  May He not rather have designed that, by continual sufferings and privations, they shall lay up for themselves treasures in Heaven such as your eyes and mine shall never see or our ears hear?  And how dare you assume that any temporal advantages could atone for that of which your teachings must deprive them—­the heavenly consolations of the love of Christ?”

Odo listened with a sense of deepening discouragement.  “But is it necessary,” he urged, “to confound Christ with His ministers, the law with its exponents?  May not men preserve their hope of heaven and yet lead more endurable lives on earth?”

“Ah, my child, beware, for this is the heresy of private judgment, which has already drawn down thousands into the pit.  It is one of the most insidious errors in which the spirit of evil has ever masqueraded; for it is based on the fallacy that we, blind creatures of a day, and ourselves in the meshes of sin, can penetrate the counsels of the Eternal, and test the balances of the heavenly Justice.  I tremble to think into what an abyss your noblest impulses may fling you, if you abandon yourself to such illusions; and more especially if it pleases God to place in your hands a small measure of that authority of which He is the supreme repository.—­When I took leave of you here nine years since,” Don Gervaso continued in a gentler tone, “we prayed together in the chapel; and I ask you, before setting out on your new life, to return there with me and lay your doubts and difficulties before Him who alone is able to still the stormy waves of the soul.”

Odo, touched by the appeal, accompanied him to the chapel, and knelt on the steps whence his young spirit had once soared upward on the heavenly pleadings of the Mass.  The chapel was as carefully tended as ever; and amid the comely appointments of the altar shone forth that Presence which speaks to men of an act of love perpetually renewed.  But to Odo the voice was mute, the divinity wrapped in darkness; and he remembered reading in some Latin author that the ancient oracles had ceased to speak when their questioners lost faith in them.  He knew not whether his own faith was lost; he felt only that it had put forth on a sea of difficulties across which he saw the light of no divine command.