when, during the brief intervals of breathing time he allowed himself,
he would look below and above, he was forced to confess that at every
step a belief, an illusion had been destroyed and trodden under foot,
and he would wonder, while bracing himself for a new effort, how it
would all end, and whether the mitre he lusted for would not after all,
perhaps, be placed upon a head that doubted even the existence of a God.
He was not a bad man, but merely one of that class who have embraced the
priesthood merely as a means of raising themselves from obscurity to
eminence, and have in their intercourse with the world discovered many
flaws and blemishes in what they may at one time have considered
perfect. When his reason rejected many of the fables hitherto cherished
and believed in, the Abbe Gerard was at the beginning inclined to
abandon in despair the attempt to discern the true from the false, and
this all the more that he saw the time thus spent was, in a worldly
sense, but wasted, and that the good things of this world come to such
reapers as gather wheat and tares alike, well knowing there is a market
for them both.

During a certain period, therefore, of his struggle upward, while his
worldly ambition was aiding by sly insinuations and comparisons the
deadly work already begun by the destruction of his dreams, Henri Gerard
was nigh being an atheist. But the nature of the man was too finely
sensual for this phase to be lasting, and when at length he found
himself so far successful in his worldly aspirations as to be tolerably
sure of their complete fulfilment; when at length he found time to
examine spiritual matters apart from their direct bearing upon his
social altitude, his aesthetic sense--which by this time had necessarily
developed--he was struck by the exquisite _beauty_ of Christianity, and
thus, as a shallow philosophy had nearly induced him to become an
atheist, a deep and sensual spirit of sentimentality nearly made him a
Christian. His Madonna was the Madonna of Raphael, not that of Albert
Duerer: the woman whose placid grace of countenance creates an emotion
more subtly voluptuous than desire; not she in whose face can be
discerned the human mother of the Man of Sorrows and of Him divinely
acquainted with all grief. The Holy Spirit he adored was not the Friend
of the broken-hearted or the Healer of the blind Bartimoeus, but He
"who feedeth among the lilies"--the Alpha and Omega of all aesthetic
concept