he possession of
which you seem to pride yourself, was in me only the parent of
remorse., . . I know it too well not to hate and fear it. Why do
you reproach me, if I try to abjure it, and cast away the burden
which I am too weak to bear? I am weak--Would you have me say that
I am strong? Would you have me try to be a Prometheus, while I am
longing to be once more an infant on a mother's breast? Let me
alone . . . I am a weary child, who knows nothing, can do nothing,
except lose its way in arguings and reasonings, and "find no end, in
wandering mazes lost." Will you reproach me, because when I see a
soft cradle lying open for me . . . with a Virgin Mother's face
smiling down all woman's love about it . . . I long to crawl into
it, and sleep awhile? I want loving, indulgent sympathy . . . I
want detailed, explicit guidance . . . Have you, then, found so
much of them in our former creed, that you forbid me to go to seek
them elsewhere, in the Church which not only professes them as an
organised system, but practises them . . . as you would find in your
first half-hour's talk with one of Her priests . . . true priests .
. . who know the heart of man, and pity, and console, and bear for
their flock the burdens which they cannot bear themselves? You ask
me who will teach a fast young man? . . . I answer, the Jesuit. Ay,
start and sneer, at that delicate woman-like tenderness, that subtle
instinctive sympathy, which you have never felt . . . which is as
new to me, alas, as it would be to you! For if there be none now-a-
days to teach such as you, who is there who will teach such as me?
Do not fancy that I have not craved and searched for teachers . . .
I went to one party long ago, and they commanded me, as the price of
their sympathy, even of anything but their denunciations, to ignore,
if not to abjure, all the very points on which I came for light--my
love for the Beautiful and the Symbolic--my desire to consecrate and
christianise it--my longing for a human voice to tell me with
authority that I was forgiven--my desire to find some practical and
palpable communion between myself and the saints of old. They told
me to cast away, as an accursed chaos, a thousand years of Christian
history, and believe that the devil had been for ages . . . just the
ages I thought noblest, most faithful, most interpenetrated with the
thought of God . . . triumphant over that church with whi