t past he only found great purity and perfect obedience.
He had been a lily whose sweet scent had charmed his masters. He could
not recall a single bad action. He had never taken advantage of the
absolute freedom of those walks, when the two prefects in charge would
go off to have a chat with a parish priest in the neighbourhood, or to
have a smoke behind a hedge, or to drink beer with a friend. Never had
he hidden a novel under his mattress, nor a bottle of _anisette_ in
a cupboard. For a long time, even, he had had no suspicion of the
sinfulness around him--of the wings of chicken and the cakes smuggled
into the seminary in Lent, of the guilty letters brought in by servers,
of the abominable conversations carried on in whispers in certain
corners of the courtyard. He had wept hot tears when he first perceived
that few among his fellows loved God for His own sake. There were
peasants' sons there who had taken orders simply through their terror
of conscription, sluggards who dreamed of a career of idleness, and
ambitious youths already agitated by a vision of the staff and the
mitre. And when he found the world's wickedness reappearing at the
altar's very foot, he had withdrawn still further into himself, giving
himself still more to God, to console Him for being forsaken.

He did recollect, however, that he had crossed his legs one day in
class, and that, when the professor reproved him for it, his face had
become fiery red, as if he had committed some abominable action. He
was one of the best students, never arguing, but learning his texts by
heart. He established the existence and eternity of God by proofs drawn
from Holy Writ, the opinions of the fathers of the Church, the universal
consensus of all mankind. This kind of reasoning filled him with an
unshakeable certainty. During his first year of philosophy, he had
worked at his logic so earnestly that his professor had checked him,
remarking that the most learned were not the holiest. In his second
year, therefore, he had carried out his study of metaphysics as a
regulation task, constituting but a small fraction of his daily duties.
He felt a growing contempt for science; he wished to remain ignorant, in
order to preserve the humility of his faith. Later on, he only followed
the course of Rohrbacher's 'Ecclesiastical History' from submission;
he ventured as far as Gousset's arguments, and Bouvier's 'Theological
Course,' without daring to take up Bellarmin, Liguori,