t time the Archbishop was at war with the whole
Chapter, and all Mayence found itself in the greatest confusion. The
cause was as follows: a Dominican monk had dreamt that he passed the
night with his penitent, the lovely Clara, who was a white nun, and a
niece of the Archbishop. In the morning it was his turn to read mass; he
did so, and, unabsolved from the night of sin, received the host in his
profane hands. At eve-tide, after a cup or two of Rhenish, he related
his dream to a young novice. The dream tickled the imagination of the
novice: he told it with some additions to a monk; and in this manner the
story, embellished with horrors and licentiousness, ran through the
convent, until it came to the ears of the Prior himself. This holy man,
who hated Father Gebhardt on account of his intimacy with the most
respectable houses, was shocked at the scandalousness of the affair,
which he considered as a profanation of the holy sacrament; and, refusing
to decide on such a weighty matter, he referred it to the Archbishop.
The Archbishop, wisely concluding that whatever sinful man wishes or
thinks by day he dreams of by night, denounced the ban of the Church
against the monk. The Chapter, whose hatred to an Archbishop always
increases the longer he lives, and gladly seizes every opportunity to
annoy him, took Father Gerhardt under its protection, and opposed the ban
on these grounds: "It is well known that the Devil tempted St. Anthony
with the most licentious representations and voluptuous enticements; and
if the Devil dared to act so with a saint, whose equal was not to be
found in the calendar, what should prevent him from playing off his
pranks with a Dominican? We must therefore advise the monk to follow the
example of the holy Anthony, and, like him, to oppose the temptations of
the fiend with the weapons of prayer and fasting. It is, however, much
to be lamented, that Satan should have so little respect for the
Archbishop as to make the instrument of his wiles assume the figure of
one of his reverence's family." The Chapter conducted itself in this
case exactly in the same manner as hereditary princes do whose fathers
live too long. But what served more completely to confuse the case was a
report from the nunnery. The nuns had assembled in the refectory, and
were busied in dressing up a Madonna for the next festival, hoping to
surpass by its magnificence their rivals the black nuns, when suddenly
the old port