d to me if I had stayed at home the afternoon that the curlew was
shot; something would have happened, for we cannot go on always
sacrificing ourselves. We can sacrifice ourselves for a time, but we
cannot sacrifice ourselves all our life long, unless we begin to take
pleasure in the immolation of self, and then it is no longer sacrifice.
Something must have happened, or I should have gone mad.

'I had suffered so much in the parish. I think the places in which we
have suffered become distasteful to us, and the instinct to wander takes
us. A migratory bird goes, or dies of home-sickness; home is not always
where we are born--it is among ideas that are dear to us: and it is
exile to live among people who do not share our ideas. Something must
have happened to me. I can think of nothing except suicide or what did
happen, for I could never have made up my mind to give pain to the poor
people and to leave a scandalous name behind; still less could I
continue to administer Sacraments that I ceased to believe in. I can
imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his
administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a
Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments. A
very abject life it is to murmur _Absolve te_ over the heads of
parishioners, and to place wafers on their tongues, when we have ceased
to believe that we have power to forgive sins and to turn biscuits into
God. A layman may have doubts, and continue to live his life as before,
without troubling to take the world into his confidence, but a priest
may not. The priest is a paid agent and the money an unbelieving priest
receives, if he be not inconceivably hardened in sin, must be hateful to
him, and his conscience can leave him no rest.

'At first I used to suspect my conversion, and began to think it
unseemly that a man should cease to believe that we must renounce this
life in order to gain another, without much preliminary study of the
Scriptures; I began to look upon myself as a somewhat superficial person
whose religious beliefs yielded before the charm of a pretty face and
winsome personality, but this view of the question no longer seems
superficial. I believe now that the superficial ones are those who think
that it is only in the Scriptures that we may discover whether we have a
right to live. Our belief in books rather than in Nature is one of
humanity's most curious characteristics, and a very ir