people of Cheylard subscribed forty-eight francs ten centimes during
1877, was being gallantly pursued against myself. It was an odd but most
effective proselytising. They never sought to convince me in argument,
where I might have attempted some defence; but took it for granted that I
was both ashamed and terrified at my position, and urged me solely on the
point of time. Now, they said, when God had led me to Our Lady of the
Snows, now was the appointed hour.

'Do not be withheld by false shame,' observed the priest, for my
encouragement.

For one who feels very similarly to all sects of religion, and who has
never been able, even for a moment, to weigh seriously the merit of this
or that creed on the eternal side of things, however much he may see to
praise or blame upon the secular and temporal side, the situation thus
created was both unfair and painful. I committed my second fault in
tact, and tried to plead that it was all the same thing in the end, and
we were all drawing near by different sides to the same kind and
undiscriminating Friend and Father. That, as it seems to lay spirits,
would be the only gospel worthy of the name. But different men think
differently; and this revolutionary aspiration brought down the priest
with all the terrors of the law. He launched into harrowing details of
hell. The damned, he said--on the authority of a little book which he
had read not a week before, and which, to add conviction to conviction,
he had fully intended to bring along with him in his pocket--were to
occupy the same attitude through all eternity in the midst of dismal
tortures. And as he thus expatiated, he grew in nobility of aspect with
his enthusiasm.

As a result the pair concluded that I should seek out the Prior, since