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Penguin Island by Anatole France
page 23 of 306 (07%)
Probus, and he was not enrolled in the canon of the saints.

"I beg the company's pardon," said he, "I have no halo, and I gained
eternal blessedness without any eminent distinction. But after what the
great St. Augustine has just told you I believe it right to impart a
cruel experience, which I had, relative to the conditions necessary for
the validity of a sacrament. The bishop of Hippo is indeed right in what
he said. A sacrament depends on the form; its virtue is in its form;
its vice is in its form. Listen, confessors and pontiffs, to my woeful
story. I was a priest in Rome under the rule of the Emperor Gordianus.
Without desiring to recommend myself to you for any special merit, I may
say that I exercised my priesthood with piety and zeal. For forty years
I served the church of St. Modestus-beyond-the-Walls. My habits were
regular. Every Saturday I went to a tavern-keeper called Barjas, who
dwelt with his wine-jars under the Porta Capena, and from him I bought
the wine that I consecrated daily throughout the week. During that long
space of time I never failed for a single morning to consecrate the holy
sacrifice of the mass. However, I had no joy, and it was with a heart
oppressed by sorrow that, on the steps of the altar I used to ask, 'Why
art thou so heavy, O my soul, and why art thou so disquieted within
me?' The faithful whom I invited to the holy table gave me cause for
affliction, for having, so to speak, the Host that I administered still
upon their tongues, they fell again into sin just as if the sacrament
had been without power or efficacy. At last I reached the end of my
earthly trials, and failing asleep in the Lord, I awoke in this abode
of the elect. I learned then from the mouth of the angel who brought me
here, that Barjas, the tavern-keeper of the Porta Capena, had sold for
wine a decoction of roots and barks in which there was not a single drop
of the juice of the grape. I had been unable to transmute this vile
brew into blood, for it was not wine, and wine alone is changed into the
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