essed Virgin.

'My father has cast me out . . . I must go to her feet. She will
have mercy, though man has none.'

'But why enter the order? Why take an irrevocable step?'

'Because it is irrevocable; because I shall enter an utterly new
life, in which old things shall pass away, and all things become
new, and I shall forget the very names of Parent, Englishman,
Citizen,--the very existence of that strange Babel of man's
building, whose roar and moan oppress me every time I walk the
street. Oh, for solitude, meditation, penance! Oh, to make up by
bitter self-punishment my ingratitude to her who has been leading me
unseen, for years, home to her bosom!--The all-prevailing mother,
daughter of Gabriel, spouse of Deity, flower of the earth, whom I
have so long despised! Oh, to follow the example of the blessed
Mary of Oignies, who every day inflicted on her most holy person
eleven hundred stripes in honour of that all-perfect maiden!'

'Such an honour, I could have thought, would have pleased better
Kali, the murder-goddess of the Thugs,' thought Lancelot to himself;
but he had not the heart to say it, and he only replied,--

'So torture propitiates the Virgin? That explains the strange story
I read lately, of her having appeared in the Cevennes, and informed
the peasantry that she had sent the potato disease on account of
their neglecting her shrines; that unless they repented, she would
next year destroy their cattle; and the third year, themselves.'

'Why not?' asked poor Luke.

'Why not, indeed? If God is to be capricious, proud, revengeful,
why not the Son of God? And if the Son of God, why not His mother?'

'You judge spiritual feelings by the carnal test of the
understanding; your Protestant horror of asceticism lies at the root
of all you say. How can you comprehend the self-satisfaction, the
absolute delight, of self-punishment?'

'So far from it, I have always had an infinite respect for
asceticism, as a noble and manful thing--the only manful thing to my
eyes left in popery; and fast dying out of that under Jesuit
influence. You recollect the quarrel between the Tablet and the
Jesuits, over Faber's unlucky honesty about St. Rose of Lima? . . .
But, really, as long as you honour asceticism as a means of
appeasing the angry deities, I shall prefer to St. Dominic's cuirass
or St. Hedwiga's chilblains, John Mytton's two hours' crawl on the
ice in his shirt, after a