Book 2
CARMEN ARIZA
BY
CHARLES FRANCIS STOCKING, E. M.
Author of THE DIARY OF JEAN EVARTS, THE MAYOR OF FILBERT, Etc.
CHICAGO
THE MAESTRO CO.
1921
Copyright 1915
BY
CHARLES FRANCIS STOCKING
ISSUED JANUARY 1916
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TWENTY-FIFTH EDITION
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
CARMEN ARIZA
Book 1
Doth this offend you?--the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
--Jesus.
CARMEN ARIZA
Chapter 1
The tropical sun mounted the rim of the golden Caribbean, quivered for a moment like a fledgeling preening its wings for flight, then launched forth boldly into the vault of heaven, shattering the lowering vapors of night into a myriad fleecy clouds of every form and color, and driving them before it into the abysmal blue above. Leaping the sullen walls of old Cartagena, the morning beams began to glow in roseate hues on the red-tiled roofs of this ancient metropolis of New Granada, and glance in shafts of fire from her glittering domes and towers. Swiftly they climbed the moss-grown sides of church and convent, and glided over the dull white walls of prison and monastery alike. Pouring through half-turned shutters, they plashed upon floors in floods of gold. Tapping noiselessly on closed portals, they seemed to bid tardy sleepers arise, lest the hurrying midday siesta overtake them with tasks unfinished. The dormitory of the ecclesiastical college, just within the east wall of the city, glowed brilliantly in the clear light which it was reflecting to the mirror of waters without. Its huge bulk had caught the first rays of the rising sun, most of which had rebounded from its drab, incrusted walls and sped out again over the dancing sea. A few, however, escaped reflection by stealing through the slanting shutters of a window close under the roof of the building. Within, they fell upon a man kneeling on the tiled floor beside a rude cot bed.
In appearance the man was not more than twenty-five years of age. His black, close-curling hair, oval face, and skin of deep olive tint indicated a Latin origin. His clerical garb proclaimed him a son of the Church. The room was a small, whitewashed cell of stone, musty with the dampness which had swept in from the sea during the night. It was furnished with Spartan simplicity. Neither image, crucifix, nor painting adorned its walls--the occupant's dress alone suggested his calling. A hanging shelf held a few books, all evidently used as texts in the adjoining college. A table, much littered; a wooden dressing stand, with a small mirror; and an old-fashioned, haircloth trunk, bearing numerous foreign labels, eked out the paucity of furnishings.
If the man prayed, there was only his reverent attitude to indicate it, for no words escaped his lips. But the frequent straining of his tense body, and the fierce clenching of his thin hands, as he threw his arms out over the unopened bed, were abundant evidence of a soul tugging violently at its moorings. His was the attitude of one who has ceased to inveigh against fate, who kneels dumbly before the cup of Destiny, knowing that it must be drained.
With the break of day the bells awoke in the church towers throughout the old city, and began to peal forth their noisy reminder of the virility of the Holy Catholic faith. Then the man raised his head, seemingly startled into awareness of his material environment. For a few moments he listened confusedly to the insistent clatter--but he made no sign of the cross, nor did his head bend with the weight of a hollow Ave on his bloodless lips while the clamoring muezzins filled the warm, tropical air with their jangling appeal. Rising with an air of weary indifference, he slowly crossed the room and threw wide the shutters of the solitary window, admitting a torrent of sunlight. As he did this, the door of the cell softly opened, and a young novitiate entered.
"With your permission, Padre," said the boy, bowing low. "His Grace summons you to the Cathedral."
The man made a languid gesture of dismissal, and turned from the lad to the rare view which greeted him through the open window. The dusty road below was beginning to manifest the city's awakening. Barefooted, brown-skinned women, scantily clad in cheap calico gowns, were swinging along with shallow baskets under their arms to the plaza for the day's marketing. Some carried naked babes astride their hips; some smoked long, slender cigars of their own rolling. Half-clad children of all ages, mixtures of mestizo, Spaniard, and Jamaican negro, trotted along beside them; and at intervals a blustering cochero rattled around the corner in a rickety, obsolete type of trap behind a brace of emaciated horses.
The lively gossip of the passing groups preluded the noisy chaffering to follow their arrival at the market place.
"Caramba, little pig!" shrilled a buxom matron, snatching her naked offspring away from a passing vehicle. "Think you I have money to waste on Masses for your naughty soul?"
"Na, señora," bantered another, "it will cost less now than later to get him out of purgatory."
"But, comadre, do you stop at the Cathedral to say a Pater-noster?"
"To be sure, amiga, and an Ave, too. And let us return by way of the Hotel España, for, quien sabe? we may catch a glimpse of the famous matador."
"Señor Varilla?"
"Yes. He arrived from Barranquilla last night--so my Pedro tells me--and will fight in the arena this Sunday. I have saved fifty pesos to see him. Madre de Dios! but I would sell my soul to see him slay but a single bull. And do you go?"
"God willing!"
The soft air, tempered by the languid ocean breeze, bore aloft the laughter and friendly bantering of the marketers, mingled with the awakening street sounds and the morning greetings which issued from opening doors and windows. The scent of roses and the heavier sweetness of orchids and tropical blooms drifted over the ancient city from its innumerable patios and public gardens. The age-incrusted buildings fused in the mounting sun into squares of dazzling white, over which the tiled roofs flowed in cinctures of crimson. Far off at sea the smoke of an approaching vessel wove fantastic designs against the tinted sky. Behind the city the convent of Santa Candelaria, crowning the hill of La Popa, glowed like a diamond; and stretching far to the south, and merging at the foot of the Cordilleras into the gloom-shrouded, menacing jungle, the steaming llanos offered fleeting glimpses of their rich emerald color as the morning breeze stirred the heavy clouds of vapor which hung sullenly above them.
To all this the man, looking vacantly out across the city walls to where the sea birds dipped on the rippling waves, was apparently oblivious. Nor did he manifest the slightest interest in the animated scene before him until a tall, heavy-set young priest emerged from the entrance of the dormitory below and stopped for a moment in the middle of the road to bask in the brilliant sunlight and fill his lungs with the invigorating ocean breeze. Turning his eyes suddenly upward, the latter caught sight of the man at the window.
"Ah, amigo Josè!" he called in friendly greeting, his handsome face aglow with a cordial smile. "Our good Saint Claver has not lobbied for us in vain! We shall yet have a good day for the bulls, no?"
"An excellent one, I think, Wenceslas," quickly replied the man addressed, who then turned abruptly away as if he wished to avoid further conversation. The priest below regarded the empty window for a moment. Then, with a short, dry laugh and a cynical shrug of his broad shoulders, he passed on.
As the man above turned back into the room his face, wearing the look of one far gone in despair, was contorted with passion. Fear, confusion, and undefined soul-longing seemed to move rapidly across it, each leaving its momentary impression, and all mingling at times in a surging flood that swelled the veins of his temples to the point of rupture. Mechanically he paced his narrow cell, throwing frequent furtive glances at the closed door, as if he suspected himself watched. Often he stopped abruptly, and with head bowed and brows furrowed, seemed to surrender his soul to the forces with which it was wrestling. Often he clasped his head wildly in his hands and turned his beseeching eyes upward, as if he would call upon an invisible power above to aid him, yet restrained by the deadening conviction of experience that such appeal would meet with no response, and that he must stand in his own strength, however feeble.
Hours passed thus. The sun gained the zenith and the streets were ablaze. Belated marketers, with laden baskets atop their heads, were hurrying homeward, hugging the scanty shade of the glaring buildings. Shopkeepers were drawing their shutters and closing their heavy doors, leaving the hot noon hour asleep on the scorching portals. The midday Angelus called from the Cathedral tower. Then, as if shaken into remembrance of the message which the boy had brought him at daybreak, the man hurriedly took his black felt hat from the table, and without further preparation left the room.
The stone pavements and narrow brick walks, above which the intense heat hung in tremulous waves, were almost deserted as he hastened toward the Cathedral. The business of the morning was finished; trade was suspended until the sun, now dropping its fiery shafts straight as plummets, should have sunk behind La Popa. As he turned into the Calle Lozano an elderly woman, descending the winding brick stairway visible through the open door of one of the numerous old colonial houses in the lower end of this thoroughfare, called timidly to him.
"Marcelena," the priest returned, stopping. "The girl--is she--?"
"She is dying," interrupted the woman in a voice broken with sobs.
"Dying! Then the child--?"
"Yes, Padre, born an hour ago--a boy. It lives. Ah, Santa Virgen, such suffering! Pray for us, Mother of God!" murmured the weeping woman, bending her head and repeatedly making the sign of the cross.
"Who is with her now?" the priest continued hurriedly.
"Only Catalina. The doctor said he would return. He is good to the blessed child. And Padre Lorenzo came--but he would not shrive her little white soul--"
"And the father--?"
"He does not know," the woman sobbed. "Who would dare to tell him! Think you he would come? That he would own the babe? He would not give one blessed candle to set beside the little mother's poor sweet body! Ah, Santa Maria! who will buy Masses for her little soul? Who--?"
"But he shall know!" cried the priest, his face livid. "And he shall acknowledge his child and care for it! Dios--! But wait, Marcelena. I can do nothing now. But I will return." Leaving the woman sobbing prayers to the Virgin Mother, the priest hurried on.
Within the Cathedral the cool atmosphere met him with a sweet calm, which flowed over his perturbed soul like a benediction. He drew a chair from a pile in a corner and sat down for a moment near one of the little side chapels, to recover from the stifling heat without and prepare his thought for the impending interview with the Bishop. A dim twilight enveloped the interior of the building, affording a grateful relief from the blinding glare of the streets. It brought him a transient sense of peace--the peace which his wearied soul had never fully known. Peace brooded over the great nave, and hovered in the soft air that drifted slowly through the deserted aisle up to the High Altar, where lay the Sacred Host. A few votive candles were struggling to send their feeble glow through the darkness. The great images of the suffering Christ, of the Saints and the Virgin Mother had merged their outlines into the heavy shadows which lay upon them.
The haunting memory of years of soul-struggle with doubt and fear, of passionate longing for the light of truth in the gloom of superstition and man-made creeds, for guidance among the devious paths of human conjecture which lead nowhither--or to madness--seemed to fade into the darkness which wrapped him in that holy calm. After all, what had he won in his lifelong warfare with human beliefs? What had he gained by his mad opposition to Holy Church? There she stood, calm, majestic, undisturbed. Had not the Christ himself declared that the gates of hell should not prevail against her? Was not the unfoldment of truth a matter, not of years, but of ages? And were the minds of men to-day prepared for higher verities than those she offered? Did not the Church plant the seed as rapidly as the barren soil of the human mind was tilled and made fallow? True, her sons, whom he had so obstinately opposed, were blindly zealous. But were they wholly without wisdom? Had not his own zeal been as unreasoningly directed to the forcing of events? And still, through it all, she had held her indulgent arms extended to him, as to all erring mankind. Why not now, like a tired child, weary of futile resistance, yield to her motherly embrace and be at last at peace? Again the temptation which he had stubbornly resisted for a lifetime urged upon him with all its mesmeric insistence.
He looked up, and his glance fell upon a small, glass-covered case, dimly visible in the uncertain light at one side of the little altar. The case was filled with tiny images of gold--milagros. Each had received priestly blessing, and each was believed to have worked a miraculous cure. The relaxed lines of the priest's care-worn face instantly drew into an expression of hard austerity. Like the ebb of the ocean, his recalcitrant thought surged back again in a towering flood.
"What a spectacle!" he murmured. "Holy Church, assuming spiritual leadership of the world, sunken in idolatry, and publicly parading her fetishism in these lingering echoes of primitive demon-worship!"
Ah, the Master taught the omnipotence of God, whose ways he declared as high above the blind grovelings of man as the dome of heaven swings above earth. But how long, gentle Master, shall such as this be declared thy Father's ways? How long shall superstition and idolatry retain the power to fetter the souls of men? Is there no end to the black curse of ignorance of Truth, which, after untold centuries, still makes men sink with vain toil and consume with disease? And--are those who sit about Peter's gorgeous tomb and approve these things unerring guides to a right knowledge of God, to know whom, the Christ has said, is life eternal?
A step behind him broke the flow of his dark revery.
"Our good Josè dreams below, while His Grace bites his nails above," said a soft, mellifluous voice. "Qué chiste! It is--"
The priest sprang to his feet and faced the speaker. For a moment the men regarded each other, the one uncertain as to the impending event, but supremely confident of his ability to meet it; the other sick in soul and torn with mental struggle, but for the moment fired anew with the righteous wrath which his recent brief interview with the woman, Marcelena, had kindled.
"Wenceslas--" The priest spoke in a strained, uncertain tone, striving to hold his emotions in leash. "I have learned to-day--The girl, Maria--"
"Caro amigo," interrupted Wenceslas smoothly, "what you have learned to-day, or any other day, of the girl, Maria, is a lie."
"Hombre!" The priest turned livid. Stepping closer to Wenceslas--
"Do you think, inhuman! that I have not long known of your relations with this girl? Who has not! And, further, I know--and Cartagena shall know--that to-day she lies dying beside your child!"
Wenceslas recoiled. His face flushed, and the veins of his forehead swelled with a purple flood. Then a pallor spread over his features, and beads of perspiration started from his pores.
It was but momentary. Recovering himself, he laid a large hand on the priest's shoulder, and, his face assuming its wonted smile, said in his usual low tone, "Amigo, it seems that you have a penchant for spreading gossip. Think you I am ignorant of the fact that because of it Rome spewed you out for a meddlesome pest? Do you deceive yourself that Cartagena will open her ears to your garbled reports? The hag, Marcelena, lies! She has long hoped to gain some advantage from me, I have told you-- But go now above and learn from His Grace, whom you have had the impudence to keep waiting all morning, how tongues that wag too freely can be silenced." He checked himself suddenly, as if he feared he had said too much. Then, turning on his heel, he quickly left the Cathedral.
The priest's head sank upon his breast, and he stood, infirm of purpose and choking with words which he could not voice. The whirl in which his confused brain had revolved for months--nay, years--had made the determination of conduct with him a matter of hours, of days, of weeks. Spontaneity of action had long since ceased within his fettered mind, where doubt had laid its detaining hand upon his judgment. Uncertainty of his steps, fear of their consequence, and dread lest he precipitate the calamity which he felt hung always just above him, had sapped the courage and strength of will which his soul needed for a determined stand, and left him incapable of decisive action, even in the face of grossest evil. The mordant reply of Wenceslas only strengthened his conviction of the futility of massing his own feeble forces against those of one so thoroughly entrenched as this man, who had the ear of the Bishop--nay, whose resourceful mind was now said to be actually directing the policies of the feeble old ecclesiastic who held the bishopric of Cartagena.
As if groping through the blackness of midnight, he moved slowly down the deserted nave of the Cathedral and mounted the winding stairs to the ambulatory above. Pausing at the door of the sanctum for a moment to gather up his remnant of moral strength, he entered and stood hesitant before the waiting Bishop.
Chapter 2
The long War of Independence which destroyed the last vestige of Spanish control over the Peruvian colonies of South America was virtually brought to a close by the terrific battle of Ayacucho, fought on the plains between Pizarro's city of Lima and the ancient Inca seat of Cuzco in the fall of 1824. The result of this battle had been eagerly awaited in the city of Cartagena, capital of the newly formed federation of Colombia. It was known there that the Royalist army was concentrating for a final stand. It was known, too, that its veterans greatly outnumbered the nondescript band of patriots, many of whom were provided only with the arma blanca, the indispensable machete of tropical America. This fact lent a shred of encouragement to the few proud Tory families still remaining in the city and clinging forlornly to their broken fortunes, while vainly hoping for a reëstablishment of the imperial regimen, as they pinned their fate to this last desperate conflict. Among these, none had been prouder, none more loyal to the Spanish Sovereign, and none more liberal in dispensing its great wealth to bolster up a hopeless cause than the ancient and aristocratic family at whose head stood Don Ignacio Josè Marquez de Rincón, distinguished member of the Cabildo, and most loyal subject of his imperial majesty, King Ferdinand VII. of Spain.
The house of Rincón traced its lineage back to the ferocious adventurer, Juan de Rincón, favorite lieutenant of the renowned Conquistador, Pedro de Heredia. When the latter, in the year 1533, obtained from Charles V. the concession of New Andalusia, the whole territory comprised between the mouths of the Magdalena and Atrato rivers in what is now the Republic of Colombia, and undertook the conquest of this enormously rich district, the fire-eating Juan, whom the chroniclers of that romantic period quaintly described as "causing the same effects as lightning and quicksilver," was his most dependable support. Together they landed at the Indian village of Calamari, and, after putting the pacific inhabitants to the sword--a manner of disposal most satisfactory to the practical Juan--laid the foundations of the present city of Cartagena, later destined to become the "Queen of the Indies," the pride, as it was the despair, of the haughty monarchs of Spain.
For his eminent services in this exploit Juan received a large tract of land in the most fertile part of the Magdalena valley--which he immediately staked and lost at the gaming-table. As a measure of consolation, and doubtless with the view of checking Juan's gambling propensities, Pedro de Heredia then bestowed upon him a strip of bleak and unexplored mountain country adjacent to the river Atrato. Stung by his sense of loss, as well as by the taunts of his boisterous companions, and harassed by the practical conclusion that life's brevity would not permit of wiping out their innumerable insults singly by the sword, the raging Juan gathered together a few blood-drinking companions of that ilk and set out to find diversion of mind on his possessions.
Years passed. One day Juan again appeared on the streets of Cartagena, and this time with gold enough to buy the city. The discovery of rich auriferous sands on his estates adjoining the Atrato, which were worked extensively for him by the natives whom he and his companions had forced into subjection, had yielded him enormous wealth. He settled in Cartagena, determined to make it his future home, and at once set about buying great blocks of houses and erecting a palace for himself. He began to acquire lands and mines in all directions. He erected a sumptuous summer residence in what is now the suburb of Turbaco. He built an arena, and bred bulls for it from famous stock which he imported from the mother-country. He gave fêtes and public entertainments on the most lavish scale imaginable. In short, he quickly became Cartagena's most influential and distinguished citizen, as he was easily her richest.
But far more important to mention than all these dry details was the undoubted change of character which had come over the man himself. Perhaps it was the awful heat of the steaming Atrato valley that drew the fire from his livid soul. Perhaps it was a dawning appreciation of the opportunities made possible by his rapid acquisition of wealth that had softened his character. Some said he had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. Others laid it to a terrible fever, in which for days he had lain delirious in the shadow of death. Be that as it may, the bloodthirsty Conquistador, who a few years before angrily shook the dust of Cartagena from his feet, had now returned a changed man.
At once Juan began to manifest in an ever increasing degree an interest in matters religious. In this respect his former character suffered a complete reversal. He assiduously cultivated the clergy, and gave large sums for the support of the Cathedral and the religious orders of the city. The Bishop became a frequent guest at his sumptuous table; and as often he in turn sought the Bishop for consultation anent his benefactions and, in particular, for consolation when haunted by sad memories of his devilish exploits in early life. When the great-hearted Padre Bartolomé de las Casas, infirm but still indefatigable in his work for the protection and uplift of the Indians, arrived one memorable day in his little canoe which his devoted native servants had paddled through the dique from the great river beyond, Juan was the first to greet him and insist that he make his home with him while in the city. And on the night of the Padre's arrival it is said that Juan, with tears streaming down his scarred and wrinkled face, begged to be allowed to confess to him the awful atrocities which he had committed upon the innocent and harmless aborigines when, as was his wont, his breath hot with the lust of blood, he had fallen upon them without provocation and hewed them limb from limb.
In his old age the now gentle Juan, his former self almost obliterated, expressed a desire to renounce the world, bestow his great wealth upon the Church, and enter a monastery to pass his remaining years. Despite the protestations of his numerous family, for whom his religious zeal would permit him to leave but scanty provision, he was already formulating plans toward this end when death overtook him, and his vast estates descended intact to the family which he had founded.
So complete had been the transformation of Juan de Rincón during the many years that he lived after his return to Cartagena that the characteristics which he transmitted to his posterity were, in general, quite the reverse of those which he himself had manifested so abundantly in early life. Whereas, he had formerly been atrociously cruel, boastingly impious, and a scoffer at matters religious, his later descendants were generally tender of heart, soft of manner, and of great piety. Whereas, in early manhood he had been fiery and impulsive, quick of decision and immovable of opinion, his progeny were increasingly inclined to be deliberate in judgment and vacillating of purpose. So many of his descendants entered the priesthood that the family was threatened with extinction, for in the course of time it had become a sacred custom in the Rincón family to consecrate the first-born son to the Church. This custom at length became fixed, and was rigidly observed, even to the point of bigotry, despite the obliteration of those branches where there was but a single son.
The family, so auspiciously launched, waxed increasingly rich and influential; and when the smoldering fires of revolution burst into flame among the oppressed South American colonies, late in the year 1812, the house of Rincón, under royal and papal patronage, was found occupying the first position of eminence and prestige in the proud old city of Cartagena. Its wealth had become proverbial. Its sons, educated by preceptors brought from Paris and Madrid, were prominent at home and abroad. Its honor was unimpeachable. Its fair name was one of the most resplendent jewels in the Spanish crown. And Don Ignacio epitomized loyalty to Sovereign and Pope.
With the inauguration of hostilities no fears were felt by the Rincón family for the ultimate success of the royalist arms, and Don Ignacio immediately despatched word to his Sovereign in Madrid that the wealth and services of his house were at the royal disposal. Of this offer Ferdinand quickly availed himself. The Rincón funds were drawn upon immediately and without stint to furnish men and muniments for the long and disastrous struggle. Of the family resources there was no lack while its members held their vast possessions of lands and mines. But when, after the first successes of the patriots, reprisals began to be visited upon the Tories of Cartagena, and their possessions fell, one after another, into the hands of the successful revolutionists, or were seized by former slaves, Don Ignacio found it difficult to meet his royal master's demands. The fickle King, already childish to the verge of imbecility, gave scant thanks in return for the Rincón loyalty, and when at last, stripped of his fortune, deserted by all but the few Tory families who had the courage to remain in Cartagena until the close of the war, Don Ignacio received with sinking heart the news of the battle of Ayacucho, he knew full well that any future appeal to Ferdinand for recognition of his great sacrifices would fall upon unhearing ears.
But to remain in republican Cartagena after the final success of the revolutionists was to the royalist Don Ignacio quite impossible. Even if permitted the attempt, he was so attached to the ancient order of things that he could not adjust himself to the radically changed conditions. So, gathering about him the sorrowing remnant of his family, and converting into a pitifully small sum his few remaining possessions, he took passage on an English trader and sailed for the mother-country, to begin life anew among those whose speech and customs were most familiar to him.
He settled in Seville, where the elder of his two sons, Rafaél de Rincón, a lad of fifteen, was studying for the priesthood, under the patronage of the Archbishop. There he established himself in the wine business, associating with him his second son, Carlos, only a year the junior of his brother. But, broken in spirit as well as in fortune, he made little headway, and two years later died pitiably in poverty and obscurity.
Through the influence of the Archbishop, the business, which Carlos was far too young and immature to conduct, was absorbed by larger interests, and the young lad retained as an employe. As the years passed the boy developed sufficient commercial ability to enable him to retain his position and to extract from it enough to provide for the needs of himself and his dependents. He married, late in life, a woman whose family had fled from Cartagena with his own and settled in Seville. She was but a babe in arms at the time of the exodus, and many years his junior. A year after the marriage a child was born to them, a son. The babe's birth was premature, following a fright which the mother received when attacked by a beggar. But the child lived. And, according to the honored family custom, which the father insisted on observing as rigidly in Spain as it had been formerly in Cartagena, this son, Josè Francisco Enrique de Rincón, was at birth consecrated to the service of God in the Holy Catholic Church.
Chapter 3
If, as Thoreau said, "God is on the side of the most sensitive," then He should have been very close to the timid, irresolute lad in Seville, in whom the softer traits of character, so unexpectedly developed in the adventurous founder of the Rincón family, now stood forth so prominently. Somber, moody, and retiring; delicately sensitive and shrinking; acutely honest, even to the point of morbidity; deeply religious and passionately studious, with a consuming zeal for knowledge, and an unsatisfied yearning for truth, the little Josè early in life presented a strange medley of characteristics, which bespoke a need of the utmost care and wisdom on the part of those who should have the directing of his career. Forced into the world before his time, and strongly marked by his mother's fear; afflicted with precarious health, and subjected to long and desperate illnesses in childhood, his little soul early took on a gloom and asceticism wholly unnatural to youth. Fear was constantly instilled into his acutely receptive mind by his solicitous, doting parents; and his life was thereby stunted, warped, and starved. He was reared under the constant reminder of the baleful effects of food, of air, of conduct, of this and that invisible force inimical to health; and terror and anxiety followed him like a ghost and turned about all his boyish memories. Under these repressing influences his mind could not but develop with a lack of stamina for self-support. Hesitancy and vacillation became pronounced. In time, the weight of any important decision gave him acute, unendurable agony of mind. Called upon to decide for himself a matter of import, his thought would become confused, his brain torpid, and in tears and perplexity the tormented lad would throw himself into the arms of his anxious parents and beg to be told what course to pursue.
Thus his nature grew to depend upon something stronger than itself to twine about. He sought it in his schoolmates; but they misread him. The little acts which were due to his keen sensitiveness or to his exaggerated reticence of disposition were frequently interpreted by them as affronts, and he was generally left out of their games, or avoided entirely. His playmates consequently became fewer and more transient as the years gained upon him, until at length, trodden upon, but unable to turn, he withdrew his love from the world and bestowed it all upon his anxious mother. She became his only intimate, and from her alone he sought the affection for which he yearned with an intensity that he could not express. Shunning the boisterous, frolicking children at the close of the school day, he would seek her, and, nestling at her side, her hand clasped in his, would beg her to talk to him of the things with which his childish thought was struggling. These were many, but they revolved about a common center--religion.
The salient characteristics already mentioned were associated with others, equally prominent, and no less influential in the shaping of his subsequent career. With the development of his deep, inward earnestness there had appeared indications of latent powers of mind that were more than ordinary. These took the form of childish precocity in his studies, clearness of spiritual vision, and maturity in his conduct and mode of life. The stunting of his physical nature threw into greater prominence his exaggerated soul-qualities, his tenderness, his morbid conscientiousness, and a profound emotionalism which, at the sight of a great painting, or the roll of the Cathedral organ, would flood his eyes and fill his throat with sobs. When the reckless founder of the family experienced a reversal of his own dark traits of soul, nearly three centuries before, it was as if the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction, and at the extreme point of its arc had left the little Josè, with the sterner qualities of the old Conquistador wholly neutralized by self-condemnation, fear, infirmity of purpose, a high degree of intellectuality, and a soul-permeating religious fervor.
At the mention of religion the timid lad at once became passionate, engrossed--nay, obsessed. In his boyhood years, before the pall of somber reticence had settled over him, he had been impressed with the majesty of the Church and the gorgeousness of her material fabric. The religious ideals taught him by his good mother took deep root. But the day arrived when the expansion of his intellect reached such a point as to enable him to detect a flaw in her reasoning. It was but a little rift, yet the sharp edge of doubt slipped in. Alas! from that hour he ceased to drift with the current of popular theological belief; his frail bark turned, and launched out upon the storm-tossed sea, where only the outstretched hand of the Master, treading the heaving billows through the thick gloom, saved it at length from destruction.
The hungry lad began to question his parents incessantly regarding the things of the spirit. His teachers in the parochial school he plied with queries which they could not meet. Day after day, while other boys of his tender age romped in the street, he would steal into the great Cathedral and stand, pathetically solitary, before the statues of the Christ and the Virgin Mary, yearning over the problems with which his childish thought was struggling, and the questions to which no one could return satisfying replies.
Here again the boy seemed to manifest in exaggerated form the reversed characteristics of the old Conquistador. But, unlike that of the pious Juan, the mind of the little Josè was not so simple as to permit it to accept without remonstrance the tenets of his family's faith. Blind acceptance of any teaching, religious or secular, early became quite impossible to him. This entailed many an hour of suffering to the lad, and brought down upon his little head severe punishments from his preceptors and parents. But in vain they admonished and threatened. The child demanded proofs; and if proofs were not at hand, his acceptance of the mooted teaching was but tentative, generally only an outward yielding to his beloved mother's inexorable insistence. Many the test papers he returned to his teachers whereon he had written in answer to the questions set, "I am taught to reply thus; but in my heart I do not believe it." Vainly the teachers appealed to his parents. Futilely the latter pleaded and punished. The placid receptiveness of the Rincón mind, which for more than three hundred years had normally performed its absorptive functions and imbibed the doctrines of its accepted and established human authorities, without a trace of the heresy of suspecting their genuineness, had at last experienced a reversal. True, the boy had been born in the early hours of nineteenth century doubt and religious skepticism. The so-called scientific spirit, buried for ages beneath the débris of human conjecture, was painfully emerging and preening its wings for flight. The "higher criticism" was nascent, and ancient traditions were already beginning to totter on the foundations which the Fathers had set. But Spain, close wrapped in mediaeval dreams, had suffered no taint of "modernism." The portals of her mind were well guarded against the entrance of radical thought, and her dreamers were yet lulled into lethargic adherence to outworn beliefs and musty creeds by the mesmerism of priestly tradition. The peculiar cast of mind of the boy Josè was not the product of influences from without, but was rather an exemplification of the human mind's reversion to type, wherein the narrow and bigoted mentality of many generations had expanded once more into the breadth of scope and untrammeled freedom of an ancient progenitor.
As the boy grew older his ability to absorb learning increased astonishingly. His power of analysis, his keen perception and retentive memory soon advanced him beyond the youths of his own age, and forced him to seek outside the pale of the schoolroom for the means to satisfy his hunger for knowledge. He early began to haunt the bookstalls of Seville, and day after day would stand for hours searching the treasures which he found there, and mulling over books which all too frequently were anathema to the orthodox. Often the owner of one of these shops, who knew the lad's parents, and whose interest had been stirred by his passion for reading, would let him take one or more of the coveted volumes home over night, for the slender family purse would not permit him to purchase what his heart craved. Then came feasts for his famished little soul which often lasted until daybreak.
It happened one evening that, when he crept off to his little room to peer into one of these borrowed treasures, his father followed him. Pushing the chamber door softly open the parent found the boy propped against his pillow in bed, absorbed in a much-thumbed volume which he was reading by the pale light of the single candle.
"Is it thus that you deceive your poor parents?" the fond father began, in a tone of mock severity.
The startled lad stifled a cry and hastily thrust the book beneath his pillow. The father's interest now became genuine. Leaning over the terrified boy he drew forth the volume.
"Voltaire!"
The doting father stood petrified. Voltaire, Antichrist, Archfiend of impiety--and in the hands of his beloved son!
Sleep fled the little household that night. In his father's arms, while the distressed mother hung over them, the boy sobbed out his confession. He had not intended to deceive. He had picked up this book in the stall without knowing its nature. He had become so interested in what it said about the Virgin Mary that he forgot all else. The shopkeeper had found him reading it, and had laughed and winked at his clerk when he bade the boy take it home for the night. The book had fascinated him. He himself--did not his father know?--had so often asked how the Virgin could be the mother of God, and why men prayed to her. Yes, he knew it mocked their faith--and the sacred Scriptures. He knew, too, that his father would not approve of it. That was why he had tried to hide it beneath his pillow. He had been wicked, desperately wicked, to deceive his dear parents--But the book--It made him forget--It said so many things that seemed to be true--And--and--
"Oh, padre mío, forgive me, forgive me! I want to know the truth about God and the world!" The delicate frame of the young lad shook in paroxysms of grief.
Alas! it was but the anguished soul-cry which has echoed through the halls of space since time began. What a mockery to meet it with empty creed and human dogma! Alas! what a crime against innocence to stifle the honest questionings of a budding mind with the musty cloak of undemonstrable beliefs.
"But, my son, have I not often told you? The Holy Church gives us the truth," replied the father, frightened by the storm which raged within the childish soul, yet more alarmed at the turn which the mind of his cherished son was apparently taking--his only son, dedicated to the service of God from the cradle, and in whom the shattered hopes of this once proud family were now centered.
"But this book laughs at us because we pray to a woman!" sobbed the boy.
"True. But does not its author need the prayers of so pure a woman as the Virgin? Do we not all need them? And is it not likely that one so good as she would have great influence with God--much greater than we ourselves, or even the best of men, could have?"
"But how can she be the mother of God? The Bible does not teach that!"
"How do you know that the Bible does not teach it, my son?"
"I--I--have read--the Bible," faltered the lad.
"You have read the Bible!" cried the astonished father. "And where have you done that, you wicked boy?"
"At the bookstore of Mariano," confessed the trembling child.
"Madre de Dios!" burst from the father, as he started to his feet. "Mariano is a wicked infidel! The Bishop shall hear of this! Ah, well may the Holy Father in Rome grieve to see his innocent babes led astray by these servants of hell! But, my son," returning to the boy and clasping him again in his arms, "it is not too late. The Virgin Mother has protected you. You meant no harm. Satan covets your pure little soul--But he shall not have it!" The father's tremulous voice mounted high, "No, by the Saints in heaven, he shall not have it!"
The boy's assurance slowly returned under the influence of his father's tender solicitude, even though he remained dimly conscious of the rift widening little by little between his parents' settled convictions and his own groping thought. With the assuaging of his grief came again those insistent questions which throughout his life had tormented his peace and driven him even to the doors of infidels in search of truth.
"Father," he began timidly, "why was I wicked to read the Bible?"
"Because, my son, in doing so you yielded to the temptations of Satan. The Bible is a great and mysterious book, written by God himself. He meant it to be explained to us by the Holy Father, who is the head of the Church which the good Saint Peter founded. We are not great enough nor good enough to understand it. The Holy Father, who cares for God's Church on earth, he is good enough, and he alone can interpret it to us. Satan tries to do with all men just what he did with you, my child. He seeks to make them read the Bible so that he can confuse them and rob them of their faith. Then when he gets possession of their souls he drags them down with him to hell, where they are lost forever."
"And does the Holy Father really believe that Mary is the mother of God?" persisted the boy, raising his tear-stained face.
"Yes--is she not? The blessed Saviour said that he and God were one. And, as Mary is the mother of Christ, she is also the mother of God--is she not? Let us read what the good Saint John Chrysostom says." He rose and went into another room, returning in a few minutes with a little volume. Taking the boy again on his knee, he continued, "The blessed Saint tells us that the Virgin Mary was made the mother of God in order that she might obtain salvation for many who, on account of their wicked lives, could not be saved, because they had so offended divine justice, but yet, by the help of her sweet mercy and mighty intercession, might be cleansed and rendered fit for heaven. My little son, you have always been taught that Mary is heaven's Queen. And so she is ours, and reigns in heaven for us. Jesus loves to have her close to him, and he can never refuse her requests. He always grants what she asks. And that is the reason why we pray to her. She never forgets us--never!"
A troubled look crossed the boy's face. Then he began anew. "Father dear, God made everything, did He not? The Bible says that, anyway."
"Yes, child."
"Did He make Satan?"
The father hesitated. The child hurried on under the lash of his holy inquisitiveness. "Father, how did evil come into the world? Is God both good and bad? And how can a good God punish us forever for sins committed here in only a few short years?"
"Ah, queridito!" cried the harassed father. "Such questions should not have entered your little head for years to come! Why can you not run and play as do other children? Why are you not happy as they are? Why must you spend your days thinking of things that are far too deep for you? Can you not wait? Some day you shall know all. Some day, when you have entered the service of God, perhaps you may even learn these things from the Holy Father himself. Then you will understand how the good God lets evil tempt us in order that our faith in Him may be exercised and grow strong--"
"And He lets Satan harm us purposely?" The boy's innocent dark eyes looked up appealingly into his father's face.
"It is only for a short time, little son. And only those who are never fit for heaven go down with Satan. But you are not one of those," he hastily added, straining the boy to him. "And the Masses which the good priests say for us will lift us out of purgatory and into heaven, where the streets are pure gold and the gates are pearl. And there we will all live together for--"
"Father," interrupted the boy, "I have thought of these things for a long, long time. I do not believe them. And I do not wish to become a priest."
The father fell silent. It was one of those tense moments which every man experiences when he sees a withering frost slowly gathering over the fondest hopes of a lifetime. The family of Rincón, aristocratic, intensely loyal to Church and State, had willingly laid itself upon the sacrificial altar in deference to its honored traditions. Custom had become law. Obedience of son to parent and parent to Sovereign, spiritual or temporal, had been the guiding star of the family's destinies. To think was lawful; but to hold opinions at variance with tradition was unspeakable heresy. Spontaneity of action was commendable; but conduct not prescribed by King or Pope was unpardonable crime. Loss of fortune, of worldly power and prestige, were as nothing; deviation from the narrow path trodden by the illustrious scions of the great Juan was everything. That this lad, to whom had descended the undying memories of a long line of glorious defenders of kingly and papal power, should presume to shatter the sacred Rincón traditions, was unbelievable. It was none other than the work of Satan. The boy had fallen an innocent victim to the devil's wiles.
But the house of Rincón had withstood the assaults of the son of perdition for more than three centuries. It would not yield now! The all-powerful Church of Rome stood behind it--and the gates of hell could not prevail against her! The Church would save her own. Yes, the father silently argued, through his brother's influence the case should be laid before His Eminence, the Archbishop. And, if need be, the Holy Father himself should be called upon to cast the devil out of this tormented child. To argue with the boy now were futile, even dangerous. The lad had grown up with full knowledge of his parents' fond hopes for his future. He had never openly opposed them, although at times the worried mother would voice her fears to the father when her little son brought his perplexing questions to her and failed to find satisfaction. But until this night the father had felt no alarm. Indeed, he had looked upon the child's inquisitiveness as but a logical consequence of his precocity and unusual mental powers, in which he himself felt a father's swelling pride. To his thought it augured rapid promotion in the Church; it meant in time a Cardinal's hat. Ah, what glorious possibilities! How the prestige of the now sunken family would soar! Happily he had been aroused to an appreciation of the boy's really desperate state in time. The case should go before the Archbishop to-morrow, and the Church should hear his call to hasten to the rescue of this wandering lamb.
Chapter 4
Seville is called the heart of Spain. In a deeper sense it is her soul. Within it, extremes touch, but only to blend into a harmonious unit which manifests the Spanish temperament and character more truly there than in any other part of the world. In its Andalusian atmosphere the religious instinct of the Spaniard reaches its fullest embodiment. True, its bull-fights are gory spectacles; but they are also gorgeous and solemn ceremonies. Its ferias are tremendously worldly; but they are none the less stupendous religious fêtes. Its picturesque Easter processions, when colossal images of the Virgin are carried among bareheaded and kneeling crowds, smack of paganism; but we cannot question the genuineness of the religious fervor thus displayed. Its Cathedral touches the arena; and its Archbishop washes the feet of its old men. Its religion is still the living force which unites and levels, exalts and debases. And its religion is Rome.
On the fragrant spring morning following the discovery of the execrated Voltaire, the little Josè, tightly clutching his father's hand, threaded the narrow Sierpes and crossed the Prado de San Sebastian, once the Quemador, where the Holy Inquisition was wont to purge heresy from human souls with fire. The father shuddered, and his stern face grew dark, as he thought of the revolting scenes once enacted in that place in the name of Christ; and he inwardly voiced a prayer of gratitude that the Holy Office had ceased to exist. Yet he knew that, had he lived in that day, he would have handed his beloved son over to that awful institution without demurral, rather than see him develop those heretical views which were already rising from the soil of his fertile, inquisitive mind.
The tinkling of a bell sounded down the street. Father and son quickly doffed their hats and knelt on the pavement, while a priest, mounted on a mule, rode swiftly past on his way to the bedside of a dying communicant, the flickering lights and jingling bell announcing the fact that he bore with him the Sacred Host.
"Please God, you will do the same some day, my son," murmured the father. But the little Josè kept his eyes to the pavement, and would make no reply.
Meanwhile, at a splendidly carved table in the library of his palatial residence, surrounded by every luxury that wealth and ecclesiastical influence could command, the Archbishop, pious shepherd of a restless flock, sat with clouded brow and heavy heart. The festive ceremonials of Easter were at hand, and the Church was again preparing to display her chief splendors. But on the preceding Easter disturbances had interrupted the processions of the Virgin; and already rumors had reached the ears of the Archbishop of further trouble to be incited during the approaching Holy Week by the growing body of skeptics and anticlericals. To what extent these liberals had assumed the proportions of a propaganda, and how active they would now show themselves, were questions causing the holy man deep concern. Heavy sighs escaped him as he voiced his fears to his sympathetic secretary and associate, Rafaél de Rincón, the gaunt, ascetic uncle of the little Josè.
"Alas!" he murmured gloomily. "Since the day that our Isabella yielded to her heretic ministers and thrust aside the good Sister Patrocinio, Spain has been in a perilous state. After that unholy act the dethronement and exile of the Queen were inevitable."
"True, Your Eminence," replied the secretary. "But is there no cause for hope in the elevation of her son, Alfonso, to the throne?"
"He is but seventeen--and absent from Spain six years. He lacks the force of his talented mother. And there is no longer a Sister Patrocinio to command the royal ear."
"Unfortunate, I admit, Your Eminence. She bore the stigmata, the very marks of our Saviour's wounds, imprinted on her flesh, and worked his miracles. But, in Alfonso--"
"No, no," interrupted the Archbishop impatiently; "he has styled himself the first Republican in Europe. He will make Catholicism the state religion; but he will extend religious toleration to all. He is consumptive in mind as well as in body. And the army--alas! what may we look for from it when soldiers like this Polo Hernandez refuse to kneel during the Mass?"
"The man has been arrested, Your Eminence," the secretary offered in consolation.
"But the court-martial acquitted him!"
"True. Yet he has now been summoned before the supreme court in Madrid."
The Archbishop's face brightened somewhat. "And the result--what think you?"
The secretary shrugged his drooping shoulders. "They will condemn him."
Yes, doubtless he would be condemned, for mediaevalism dies hard in Spain. But the incident was portentous, and the Archbishop and his keen secretary heard in it an ominous echo.
A servant appeared at the heavy portieres, and at a sign from the secretary ushered Josè and his father into the august presence awaiting them.
An hour later the pair emerged from the palace and started homeward. His Eminence, rousing himself from the profound revery in which he had been sunk for some moments, turned to his expectant secretary.
"A Luther in embryo!" he ejaculated.
"I feared as much, Your Eminence," returned the austere secretary.
"And yet, a remarkable intellect! Astonishing mental power! But all tainted with the damnable so-called scientific spirit!"
"True, Your Eminence."
"But marked you not his deep reverence for God? And his sturdy honesty? And how, despite his embarrassment, the religious zeal of his soul shown forth?"
"He is morbidly honest, Your Grace."
"A trait I wish we might employ to our own advantage," mused the churchman. Then, continuing, "He is learned far beyond his years. Indeed, his questions put me to some stress--but only for the difficulty of framing replies intelligible to a mind so immature," he added hastily. "Either he feared my presence, or he is naturally shrinking."
"He is so by nature, Your Eminence."
The Archbishop reflected. "Naïve--pure--simple--mature, yet childish. Have we covered the ground?"
"Not fully, Your Eminence. We omitted to mention his absorbing filial devotion."
"True. And that, you tell me, is most pronounced."
"It is his strongest characteristic, Your Eminence. He has no will to oppose it."
"Would that his devotion were for Holy Church!" sighed the Archbishop.
"I think it may be so directed, Your Eminence," quickly returned the secretary.
"But--would he ever consent to enter the priesthood? And once in, would he not prove a most dangerous element?"
The secretary made a deprecating gesture. "If I may suggest, such a man as he promises to become is far more dangerous outside of the Church than within, Your Eminence."
The Archbishop studied the man's face for a few moments. "There is truth in your words, my friend. Yet how, think you, may he be secured?"
"Your Eminence," replied the secretary warmly, "pardon these suggestions in matters where you are far better fitted to pass sound judgment than a humble servant of the Church like myself. But in this case intimacy with my brother's family affords me data which may be serviceable in bringing this matter to a conclusion. If I may be permitted--"
The Archbishop nodded an unctuous and patronizing appreciation of his elderly secretary's position, and the latter continued--
"Your Eminence, Holy Week is approaching, and we are beset with fears lest the spirit of heresy which, alas! is abroad in our fair city, shall manifest itself in such disturbances as may force us to abandon these religious exercises in future. I need not point out the serious nature of these demonstrations. Nor need I suggest that their relative unimportance last year was due solely to lack of strong leadership. Already our soldiers begin to refuse to kneel during the Mass. The Holy Church is not yet called upon to display her weapons. But who shall say to what measures she may not be forced when an able and fearless leader shall arise among the heretics? To-day there has stood before Your Eminence a lad possessing, in my opinion, the latent qualifications for such leadership. I say, latent. I use the term advisedly, for I know that he appears to manifest the Rincón lack of decision. But so did I at his age. And who can say when the unfolding of his other powers, now so markedly indicated, may not force the development of those certain traits of character in which he now seems deficient, but which, developed, would make him a power in the world? Shall the Church permit this promising lad to stray from her, possibly later to join issue with her enemies and use his great gifts to propagate heresy and assault her foundations? Are we faithful to our beloved Mother if we do not employ every means, foul or fair, to destroy her enemies, even in the cradle? Remember, 'He who gains the youth, possesses the future,' as the saying goes."
"Loyally spoken, faithful son," replied the Archbishop, shifting into a more comfortable position. "And you suggest--?"
"This: that we wisely avail ourselves of his salient characteristics--his weaknesses, if you wish--and secure him now to the Church."
"And, more specifically--?" with increasing animation.
"Your Eminence is already aware of the custom in our family of consecrating the first-born son to the service of God. This boy has been so consecrated from birth. It is the dearest hope of his parents. At present their wishes are still his law. Their judgments yet formulate his conduct. His sense of honor is acute. Your Eminence can see that his word is sacred. His oath once taken would bind him eternally. It is for us to secure that oath!"
"And how?" The Archbishop leaned forward eagerly.
"We, coöperating with his parents, will cater to his consuming passion for learning, and offer him the education which the limited resources of his family cannot provide. We save him from the drudgery of commercialism, and open to him the life of the scholar. We suggest to him a career consecrated to study and holy service. The Church educates him--he serves his fellow-men through her. Once ordained, his character is such, I believe, that he could never become an apostate. And, whatever his services to Holy Church may be thereafter, she at least will have effectually disposed of a possible opponent. She has all to gain, and nothing to lose by such procedure. Unless I greatly mistake the Rincón character, the lad will yield to our inducements and his mother's prayers, the charm of the Church and the bias of her tutelage, and ultimately take the oath of ordination. After that--"
"My faithful adviser," interrupted the Archbishop genially, as visions of the Cardinal's hat for eminent services hovered before him, "write immediately to Monsignor, Rector of the Seminario, in Rome. Say that he must at once receive, at our expense and on our recommendation, a lad of twelve, who greatly desires to be trained for the priesthood."
Chapter 5
Thus did the Church open her arms to receive her wandering child. Thus did her infallible wisdom, as expressed through her zealous agents in Seville, essay to solve the perplexing problems of this agitated little mind, and whisper to its confused throbbing, "Peace, be still." The final disposition came to the boy not without some measure of relief, despite, his protest. The long days of argument and pleading, of assurance that within the Church he should find abundant and satisfactory answers to his questions, and of explanations which he was adjured to receive on faith until such time as he might be able to prove their soundness, had utterly exhausted his sensitive little soul, and left him without the combative energy or will for further remonstrance.
Nor was the conflict solely a matching of his convictions against the desires of his parents and the persuasions of the Archbishop and his loyal secretary. The boy's hunger for learning alone might have caused him to yield to the lure of a broad education. Moreover, his nature contained not one element of commercialism. The impossibility of entering the wine business with his father, or of spending his life in physical toil for a bare maintenance, was as patent to himself, even at that early age, as to his parents. His bent was wholly intellectual. But he knew that his father could not afford him an education. Yet this the Church now offered freely. Again, his nature was essentially religious. The Church now extended all her learning, all her vast resources, all her spiritual power, to develop and foster this instinct. Nay, more, to protect and guide its development into right channels.
The fact, too, that the little Josè was a child of extreme emotions must not be overlooked in an estimate of the influences which bore upon him during these trying days. His devotion to an object upon which he had set his affections amounted to obsession. He adored his parents--reverenced his father--worshiped his mother. The latter he was wont to compare to the flowers, to the bright-plumed birds, to the butterflies that hovered in the sunlight of their little patio. He indited childish poems to her, and likened her in purity and beauty to the angels and the Virgin Mary. Her slightest wish was his inflexible law. Not that he was never guilty of childish faults of conduct, of little whims of stubbornness and petulance; but his character rested on a foundation of honesty, sincerity, and filial love that was never shaken by the summer storms of naughtiness which at times made their little disturbances above.
The parents breathed a sigh of relief when the tired child at last bowed to their wishes and accepted the destiny thrust upon him. The coming of a son to these loyal royalists and zealous Catholics had meant the imposition of a sacred trust. That he was called to high service in the Church of God was evidenced by Satan's early and malicious attacks upon him. There was but one course for them to pursue, and they did not for a moment question its soundness. To their thought, this precocious child lacked the wisdom and balance which comes only with years. The infallible Church, their all-wise spiritual guide, supported their contentions. What they did was for her and for the eternal welfare of the boy. Likewise, for the maintenance of family pride and honor in a generation tainted with liberalism and distrust of the sacred traditions.
The Church, on the other hand, in the august person of the Archbishop, had accomplished a triumph. She had recognized the child's unusual gifts of mind, and had been alert to the dangers they threatened. If secured to herself, and their development carefully directed, they would mold him into her future champion. If, despite her careful weeding and pruning, they expanded beyond the limits which she set, they should be stifled! The peculiar and complex nature of the child offered her a tremendous advantage. For, if reactionary, his own highly developed sense of honor, together with his filial devotion and his intense family pride, should of themselves be forced to choke all activity in the direction of apostasy and liberalism. Heaven knew, the Church could not afford to neglect any action which promised to secure for her a loyal son; or, failing that, at least effectually check in its incipiency the development of a threatened opponent! Truly, as the astute secretary had said, this boy might prove troublesome within the fold; but he might also prove more dangerous without. Verily, it was a triumph for the cause of righteousness! And after the final disposition, the good Archbishop had sat far into the night in the comfort of his sanctum, drowsing over his pleasant meditations on the rewards which his unflagging devotion to the cause of Holy Church was sure some day to bring.
Time sped. The fragrant Sevillian spring melted into summer, and summer merged with fall. The Rincón family was adjusting itself to the turn in the career of its heir, the guardian and depository of its revived hopes. During the weeks which intervened between his first interview with the Archbishop and his final departure for Rome, Josè had been carefully prepared by his uncle, who spared no effort to stimulate in the boy a proper appreciation of his high calling. He was taught that as a priest of the Holy Catholic Church he would become a representative of the blessed Christ among men. His mission would be to carry on the Saviour's work for the salvation of souls, and, with the power of Christ and in His name, to instruct mankind in true beliefs and righteous conduct. He would forgive sins, impose penalties, and offer sacrificial atonement in the body of the Saviour--in a word, he was to become sacerdos alter Christus, another Christ. His training for this exalted work would cover a period of six or eight years, perhaps longer, and would fit him to become a power among men, a conserver of the sacred faith, and an ensample of the highest morality.
"Ah, sobrinito," the sharp-visaged, gray-haired uncle had said, "truly a fortunate boy are you to hear this grandest of opportunities knocking at your door! A priest--a God! Nay, even more than God, for as priest God gives you power over Himself!"
The boy's wondering eyes widened, and a look of mingled confusion and astonishment came into his wan face. "I do not see, tío mío--I do not see," he murmured.
"But you shall, you shall! And you shall understand the awful responsibility which God thus reposes upon you, when He gives you power to do greater things than He did when He created the world. You shall command the Christ, and He shall come down at your bidding. Ah, chiquito, a fortunate boy!" But the lad turned wearily away, without sharing his uncle's enthusiasm.
The day before his departure Josè was again conducted before the Archbishop, and after listening to a lengthy résumé of what the Church was about to do for him, and what she expected in return, two solemn vows were exacted from him--
"First," announced the uncle, in low, deliberate tones, "you will solemnly promise your mother and your God that, daily praying to be delivered from the baneful influences which now cause doubt and questioning in your mind, and refraining from voicing them to your teachers or fellow-students, you will strive to accept all that is taught you in Rome, deferring every endeavor to prove the teachings you are to receive until the end of your long course, when, by training and discipline, you shall have so developed in goodness, purity, and power, that you shall be found worthy to receive spiritual confirmation of the great tenets upon which the Holy Roman Catholic Church has been founded and reared."
He paused for a moment to catch his breath and let his portentous words sink into the quivering brain of the lad before him. Then he resumed--
"Second, keeping ever in mind your debt of gratitude to the Church, you promise faithfully to finish your course, and at the end offer yourself to the service of God in the holy priesthood."
The solemn hush that lay over the room when he finished was broken only by the muffled sobs of the mother.
Tender in years, plunged into grief at the impending separation from home and all that he held dear, the boy knelt before the secretary and gave his trembling word to observe these obligations. Then, after he had kissed the Bible and the Archbishop's extended hand, he threw himself upon the floor in a torrent of tears.
On the following morning, a bright, sparkling November day, the little Josè, spent with emotion, tore himself from his mother's clinging embrace and set out for Rome, accompanied by his solicitous uncle.
"And, queridito," were the mother's last words, "I have your promise that never will you voluntarily leave the Church?"
The appeal which his beseeching look carried back to her was not granted. He slowly bowed his acquiescence, and turned away. A week later he had entered upon the retreat with which the school year opens in the Seminario.
Chapter 6
Rome, like a fallen gladiator, spent and prostrate on the Alban hills, still awaits the issue of the conflict between the forces of life and death within. Dead, where the blight of pagan and mediaeval superstition has eaten into the quivering tissues; it lives where the pulsing current of modernism expands its shrunken arteries and bears the nourishing truth. Though eternal in tradition and colossal in material achievement, the glory of the Imperial City nevertheless rests on a foundation of perishable human ambitions, creeds, and beliefs, manifested outwardly for a time in brilliant deeds, great edifices, and comprehensive codes, but always bearing within themselves the seeds of their own decay. No trophy brought to her gates in triumph by the Caesars ever approached in worth the simple truth with which Paul of Tarsus, chained to his jailer, illumined his gloomy dungeon. Had the religious principles which he and his devoted associates labored so unselfishly to impart to a benighted world for its own good been recognized by Rome as the "pearl without price," she would have built upon them as foundation stones a truer glory, and one which would have drawn the nations of the earth to worship within her walls. But Rome, in her master, Constantine, saw only the lure of a temporal advantage to be gained by fettering the totally misunderstood teachings of Jesus with the shackles of organized politics. From this unhallowed marriage of religion and statecraft was born that institution unlike either parent, yet exhibiting modified characteristics of each, the Holy Church. To this institution, now mighty in material riches and power, but still mediaeval in character, despite the assaults of centuries of progress, a combination of political maneuver, bigotry, and weakness committed the young Josè, tender, sensitive, receptive, and pure, to be trained as an agent to further its world-embracing policies.
The retreat upon which the boy at once entered on his arrival at the seminary extended over ten days. During this time there were periods of solitary meditation--hours when his lonely heart cried out in anguish for his beloved mother--visits to the blessed sacrament, recitations of the office, and consultations with his spiritual advisers, at which times his promises to his parents and the Archbishop, coupled with his natural reticence and the embarrassment occasioned by his strange environment, sealed his lips and prevented the voicing of his honest questions and doubts. It was sought through this retreat to so bring the lad under the influence of the great religious teachings as to most deeply impress his heart and mind with the importance of the seminary training upon which he had entered. His day began with the dreaded meditation at five in the morning, followed by hearing the Mass and receiving Communion. It closed, after study and class work, with another visit to the blessed sacrament, recital of the Rosary, spiritual reading, and prayer. On Sundays he assisted at solemn High Mass in the church of the Seminario Pio. One day a week was a holiday; but only in the sense that it was devoted to visiting hospitals and charitable institutions, in order to acquire practical experience and a foretaste of his future work among the sick and needy. Clad in his little violet cassock, low-crowned, three-cornered hat, and soprana, he might be seen on these holidays trotting along with his fellow-students in the wake of their superior, his brow generally contracted, and his childish face seldom lighted by a happy smile.
The first year passed without special incident. The boy, filled with that quenchless ambition to know, which characterizes the finest minds, entered eagerly upon his studies and faithfully observed his promises. If his tender soul warped and his fresh, receptive mind shriveled under the religious tutelage he received, no one but himself knew it, not even his fond mother, as she clasped him again in her arms when he returned home for the first summer vacation. With the second year there began studies of absorbing interest to the boy, and the youthful mind fed hungrily. This seemed to have the effect of expanding somewhat his self-contained little soul. He appeared to grow out of himself to a certain extent, to become less timid, less reticent, even more sociable; and when he returned to Seville again at the close of the year he had apparently lost much of the somberness of disposition which had previously characterized him. The Archbishop examined him closely; but the boy, speaking little, gave no hint of the inner working of his thought; and if his soul seethed and fermented within, the Rincón pride and honor covered it with a placid demeanor and a bearing of outward calm. When the interview ended and the lad had departed, the Archbishop descended to the indignity of roundly slapping his ascetic secretary on his emaciated back, as an indication of triumphant joy. The boy certainly was being charmed into deep devotion to the Church! He was fast being bound to her altars! Again the glorious spectacle of the Church triumphant in molding a wavering youth into a devoted son!
Four years passed thus, almost in silence on the boy's part. Yet his character suffered little change. At home he strove to avoid all mention of the career upon which he was entering, although he gave slight indication of dissatisfaction with it. He was punctilious in his attendance upon religious services; but to have been otherwise would have brought sorrow to his proud, happy parents. His days were spent in complete absorption in his books, or in writing in his journal. The latter he had begun shortly before entering the seminary, and it was destined to exert a profound influence upon his life. Often his parents would playfully urge him to read to them from it; but the boy, devotedly obedient and filial in every other respect steadfastly begged permission to refuse these requests. In that little whim the fond parents humored him, and he was left largely alone to his books and his meditations.
During Josè's fourth summer vacation a heavy sorrow suddenly fell upon him and plunged him into such an excess of grief that it was feared his mind would give way. His revered father, advanced in years, and weakened by overwork and business worries, succumbed to the malaria so prevalent in Seville during the hot months and passed away, after a brief illness. The blow descended with terrific force upon the morbidly disposed lad. It was his first intimate experience with death. For days after the solemn events of the mourning and funeral he sat as one stunned, holding his mother's hand and staring dumbly into space; or for hours paced to and fro in the little patio, his face rigidly set and his eyes fixed vacantly on the ground beneath. The work of four years in opening his mind, in expanding his thought, in drawing him out of his habitual reticence and developing within him the sense of companionship and easy tolerance, was at one stroke rendered null. Brought face to face with the grim destroyer, all the doubt and confusion of former years broke the bounds which had held them in abeyance and returned upon him with increased insistence. Never before had he felt so keenly the impotence of mortal man and the futility of worldly strivings. Never had he seen so clearly the fatal defects in the accepted interpretation of Christ's mission on earth. His earlier questionings returned in violent protests against the emptiness of the beliefs and formalities of the Church. In times past he had voiced vague and dimly outlined perceptions of her spiritual needs. But now to him these needs had suddenly taken definite form. Jesus had healed the sick of all manner of disease. He himself was being trained to represent the Christ on earth. Would he, too, be taught to heal the sick as the Master had done? The blessed Saviour said, "The works that I do, ye shall do also." But the priests, his representatives, clearly were not doing the works of the Master. And if he himself had been an ordained priest at the time of his father's death, could he have saved him? No, he well knew that he could not. And yet he would have been the Saviour's representative among men. Alas! how poor a one he well knew.
In his stress of mind he sought his uncle, and by him was again led before the Archbishop. His reticence and timidity dispersed by his great sorrow, the distraught boy faced the high ecclesiastic with questions terribly blunt.
"Why, my Father, after four years in the Seminario, am I not being taught to do the works which our blessed Saviour did?"
The placid Archbishop stared at the boy in dumb astonishment. Again, after years of peace that had promised quiescence on these mooted points! Well, he must buckle on his armor--if indeed he had not outgrown it quite--and prepare to withstand anew the assaults of the devil!
"H'm!--to be specific, my son--you mean--?" The great man was sparring.
"Why do we not heal the sick as he did?" the boy explained tersely.
"Ah!" The peace-loving man of God breathed easier. How simple! The devil was firing a cracked blunderbuss.
"My son," he advanced with paternal unction, "you have been taught--or should have been, ere this--that the healing miracles of our blessed Saviour belong to a dispensation long past. They were special signs from God, given at the time of establishing His Church on earth, to convince an incredulous multitude. They are not needed now. We convince by logic and reason and by historical witnesses to the deeds of the Saints and our blessed Saviour." As he pronounced this sacred name the holy man devoutly crossed himself. "Men would believe no more readily to-day," he added easily, "even if they should see miracles of healing, for they would attribute them to the human mentality, to suggestion, hypnotism, hallucination, and the like. Even the mighty deeds of Christ were attributed to Beelzebub." The complacent Father settled back into his chair with an air of having disposed for all time of the mooted subject of miracles.
"That begs the question, my Father!" returned the boy quickly and excitedly. "And as I read church history it is thus that the question has been begged ever since the first century!"
"What!" The Archbishop was waxing hot. "Do you, a mere child of sixteen, dare to dispute the claims of Holy Church?"
"My Father," the boy spoke slowly and with awful earnestness, "I have been four years in the Seminario. I do not find the true Christ there; nor do I think I shall find him within the Church."
"Sanctissima Maria!" The Archbishop bounded to his feet "Have you sold yourself to the devil?" he exploded. "Have you fed these years at the warm breasts of the Holy Mother, only to turn now and rend her? Have you become a Protester? Apostate and forsworn!"
"My Father," the boy returned calmly, "did Jesus tell the truth--or did he lie? If he spoke truth, then I think he is not in the Church to-day. She has wholly misunderstood him--or else she--she deliberately falsifies."
The Archbishop sank gasping into his chair.
Josè went on. "You call me apostate and forsworn. I am neither. One cannot become apostate when he has never believed. As to being forsworn--I am a Rincón!"
The erect head and flashing eyes of the youth drew an involuntary exclamation of approval from the anxious secretary, who had stood striving to evolve from his befuddled wits some course adequate to the strained situation.
But the boy's proud bearing was only momentary. The wonted look of troubled wistfulness again settled over his face, and his shoulders bent to their accustomed stoop, as if his frail body were slowly crushing beneath a tremendous burden.
"My Father," he continued sadly, "do not the Gospels show that Jesus proved the truth of all he taught by doing the works which we call miracles? But does the Church to-day by any great works prove a single one of her teachings? You say that Christianity no longer needs the healing of the sick in order to prove its claims. I answer that, if so, it likewise no longer needs the preaching of the gospel, for I cannot find that Jesus made any distinction between the two. Always he coupled one with the other. His command was ever, 'Preach the gospel, heal the sick!' His works of healing were simply signs which showed that he understood what he taught. They were his proofs, and they followed naturally his great understanding of God. But what proofs do you offer when you ask mankind to accept your preaching? Jesus said, 'He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also.' If you do not do the works which he did, it shows plainly that you do not believe on him--that is, that you do not understand him. When I am an ordained priest, and undertake to preach the gospel to the world, must I confess to my people that I cannot prove what I am teaching? Must I confess that there is no proof within the Church? Is it not so, that true believers in Jesus Christ believe exactly in the proportion in which they obey him and do his works?"
The boy paused for breath. The Archbishop and his secretary sat spellbound before him. Then he resumed--
"How the consecrated wafer through the words of a priest becomes the real body of Christ, I am as yet unable to learn. I do not believe it does. How priests can grant absolution for sins when, to me, sins are forgiven only when they are forsaken, I have not been taught. I do not believe they can. The Church assumes to teach these things, but it cannot prove them. From the great works of Jesus and his apostles it has descended to the blessing of milagros and candles, to the worship of the Virgin and man-made Saints, to long processions, to show and glitter--while without her doors the poor, the sick and the dying stretch out their thin, white hands and beseech her to save them, not from hell or purgatory in a supposed life to come, but from misery, want and ignorance right here in this world, as Jesus told his followers they should do. If you can show forth the omnipotence of God by healing the sick and raising the dead, I could accept that as proof of your understanding of the teachings of Jesus--and what you really understand you can demonstrate and teach to others. Theological questions used to bother me, but they do so no longer. Holy oil, holy water, blessed candles, incense, images and display do not interest me as they did when a child, nor do they any longer seem part of an intelligent worship of God. But"--his voice rising in animation--"to touch the blind man's eyes and see them open; to bid the leper be clean, and see his skin flush with health--ah! that is to worship God in spirit and in truth--that is to prove that you understand what Jesus taught and are obeying, not part, but all of his commands. I am not apostate"--he concluded sadly--"I never did fully believe that the religion of Jesus is the religion which the Church to-day preaches and pretends to practice. I do not believe in her heaven, her purgatory or her hell, nor do I believe that her Masses move God to release souls from torment. I do not believe in her powers to pardon and curse. I do not believe in her claims of infallibility. But--"
He hesitated a moment, as if not quite sure of his ground. Then his face glowed with sudden eagerness, and he cried, "My Father, the Church needs the light--do you not see it?--do you not, my uncle?" turning appealingly to the hard-faced secretary. "Can we not work to help her, and through her reach the world? Should not the Church rightly be the greatest instrument for good? But how can she teach the truth when she herself is so filled with error? How can she preach the gospel when she knows not what the gospel is? But Jesus said that if we obeyed him we should know of the doctrine, should know the true meaning of the gospel. But we must first obey. We must not only preach, but we must become spiritually minded enough to heal the sick--"
"Dios nos guarde!" interrupted the Archbishop, attempting to rise, but prevented by his secretary, who laid a restraining hand on his arm. The latter then turned to the overwrought boy.
"My dear Josè," he said, smiling patronizingly upon the youth, although his cold eyes glittered like bits of polished steel, "His Eminence forgives your hasty words, for he recognizes your earnestness, and, moreover, is aware how deeply your heart is lacerated by your recent bereavement. But, further--and I say this in confidence to you--His Eminence and I have discussed these very matters to which you refer, and have long seen the need of certain changes within the Church which will redound to her glory and usefulness. And you must know that the Holy Father in Rome also recognizes these needs, and sees, too, the time when they will be met. However, his great wisdom prevents him from acting hastily. You must remember that our blessed Saviour suffered many things to be so for the time, although he knew they would be altered in due season. So it is with the Church. Her children are not all deep thinkers, like yourself, but are for the most part poor and ignorant people, who could not understand your high views. They must be led in ways with which they are familiar until they can be lifted gradually to higher planes of thought and conduct. Is it not so? You are one who will do much for them, my son--but you will accomplish nothing by attempting suddenly to overthrow the established traditions which they reverence, nor by publicly prating about the Church's defects. Your task will be to lead them gently, imperceptibly, up out of darkness into the light, which, despite your accusations, does shine in the Church, and is visible to all who rightly seek it. You have yet four years in the Seminario. You gave us your promise--the Rincón word--that you would lay aside these doubts and questionings until your course was completed. We do not hold you--but you hold yourself to your word! Our sincere advice is that you keep your counsel, and silently work with us for the Church and mankind. The Church will offer you unlimited opportunities for service. She is educating you. Indeed, has she not generously given you the very data wherewith you are enabled now to accuse her? You will find her always the same just, tolerant, wise Mother, leading her children upward as fast as they are able to journey. Her work is universal, and she is impervious to the shafts of envy, malice, and hatred which her enemies launch at her. She has resources of which you as yet know nothing. In the end she will triumph. You are offered an opportunity to contribute toward that triumph and to share in it. His Eminence knows that you will not permit Satan to make you reject that offer now."
The secretary's sharp, beady eyes looked straight into those of the youth, and held him. His small, round head, with its low brow and grizzled locks, waved snake-like on the man's long neck. His tall form, in its black cassock, bent over the lad like a spectre. His slender arms, of uncanny length, waved constantly before him; and the long, bony fingers seemed to reach into the boy's very soul and choke the springs of life at their origin. His reasoning took the form of suggestion, bearing the indisputable stamp of authority. Again, the boy, confused and uncertain, bowed before years and worldly experience, and returned to his solitude and the companionship of his books and his writing.
"Occupy till I come," the patient Master had tenderly said. From earliest boyhood Josè had heard this clarion call within his soul. And striving, delving, plodding, he had sought to obey--struggling toward the distant gleam, toward the realization of something better and nearer the Master's thought than the childish creeds of his fellow-men--something warmer, more vital than the pulseless decrees of ecumenical councils--something to solve men's daily problems here on earth--something to heal their diseases of body and soul, and lift them into that realm of spiritual thinking where material pleasures, sensations, and possessions no longer form the single aim and existence of mankind, and life becomes what in reality it is, eternal ecstasy! The Christ had promised! And Josè would occupy and wait in faith until, with joy inexpressible, he should behold the shining form of the Master at the door of his opened tomb.
"With Your Eminence's permission I will accompany the boy back to Rome," the secretary said one day, shortly before Josè's return to the seminary. "I will consult with the Rector, and suggest that certain and special tutelage be given the lad. Let them bring their powers of reasoning and argument to bear upon him, to the end that his thinking may be directed into proper channels before it is too late. Hombre!" he muttered, as with head bent and hands clasped behind his back he slowly paced before the Archbishop. "To think that he is a Rincón! And yet, but sixteen--a babe--a mere babe!"
Chapter 7
It must have been, necessarily, a very complex set of causes that could lay hold on a boy so really gifted as Josè de Rincón and, against his instincts and, on the part of those responsible for the deed, with the certain knowledge of his disinclination, urge him into the priesthood of a religious institution with which congenitally he had but little in common.
To begin with, the bigoted and selfish desires of his parents found in the boy's filial devotion a ready and sufficient means of compelling him to any sacrifice of self. Only a thorough understanding of the Spanish temperament will enable one to arrive at a just estimate of Josè's character, and the sacredness of the promises given his mother. Though the child might pine and droop like a cankered rosebud, yet he would never cease to regard the sanctity of his oath as eternally binding. And the mother would accept the sacrifice, for her love for her little son was clouded by her great ambitions in respect to his earthly career, and her genuine solicitude for his soul's eternal welfare.
Family tradition, sacred and inviolable, played its by no means small part in this affair. Custom, now as inviolable as the Jewish law, decreed that the first-born son should sink his individuality into that of the Mother Church. And to the Spaniard, costumbre is law. Again, the vacillating and hesitant nature of the boy himself contributed largely to the result; for, though supremely gifted in receptivity and broadness of mind, in critical analysis and keenness of perception, he nevertheless lacked the energy of will necessary to the shaping of a life-course along normal lines. The boy knew what he preferred, yet he said Amen both to the prayers of his parents and the suggestions of doubt which his own mind offered. He was weakest where the greatest firmness was demanded. His love of study, his innate shrinking from responsibility, and his repugnance toward discord and strife--in a word, his lack of fighting qualities--naturally caused him to seek the lines of least resistance, and thus afforded a ready advantage to those who sought to influence him.
But why, it may be asked, such zeal on the part of the Archbishop and his secretary in forcing upon the boy a career to which they knew he was disinclined? Why should loyal agents of the Church so tirelessly urge into the priesthood one who might prove a serpent in her bosom?
The Archbishop may be dismissed from this discussion. That his motives were wholly above the bias of worldly ambition, we may not affirm. Yet we know that he was actuated by zeal for the Church; that he had its advancement, its growth in power and prestige always at heart. And we know that he would have rejoiced some day to boast, "We have saved to the Church a brilliant son who threatened to become a redoubtable enemy." The forces operating for and against this desideratum seemed to him about equally matched. The boy was still very young. His mind was as yet in the formative period, and would be for some years. If the Church could secure her hold upon him during this period she would doubtless retain it for all time; for, as the sagacious secretary so often quoted to his superior, "Once a priest, always a priest," emphasizing the tenet that the character imprinted by ordination is ineffaceable.
As for the secretary, he was a Rincón, proud and bigoted, and withal fanatically loyal to the Church as an institution, whatever its or his own degree of genuine piety. It was deeply galling to his ecclesiastical pride to see the threatened development of heretical tendencies in a scion of his house. These were weeds which must and should be choked, cost what it might! To this end any means were justified, for "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" And the Rincón soul had been molded centuries ago. The secretary hated the rapidly developing "scientific" spirit of the age and the "higher criticism" with a genuine and deadly hatred. His curse rested upon all modern culture. To him, the Jesuit college at Rome had established the level of intellectual freedom. He worshiped the landmarks which the Fathers had set, and he would have opposed their removal with his life. No, the Rincón traditions must be preserved at whatever cost! The heretical buddings within Josè should be checked; he should enter the priesthood; his thinking should be directed into proper channels; his mind should be bent into conformity with Holy Church! If not--but there was no alternative. The all-powerful Church could and would accomplish it.
In the choice of Rafaél de Rincón as secretary and assistant, the Archbishop had secured to himself a man of vast knowledge of ecclesiastical matters, of great acumen, and exceptional ability. The man was a Jesuit, and a positive, dynamic representative of all that the order stands for. He was now in his sixty-eighth year, but as vigorous of mind and body as if he bore but half his burden of age. For some years prior to his connection with the See of Seville he had served in the royal household at Madrid. But, presumably at the request of Queen Isabella, he had been peremptorily summoned to Rome some three years before her exile; and when he again left the Eternal City it was with the tentative papal appointment to Seville.
Just why Padre Rafaél had been relieved of his duties in Madrid was never divulged. But gossip supplied the paucity of fact with the usual delectable speculations, the most persistent of which had to do with the rumored birth of a royal child. The deplorable conduct of the Queen after her enforced marriage to Don Francisco D'Assis had thrown the shadow of suspicion on the legitimacy of all her children; and when it began to be widely hinted that Padre Rafaél, were he so disposed, might point to a humble cottage in the sunlit hills of Granada where lay a tiny Infanta, greatly resembling the famous singer and favorite of the Queen, Marfori, Marquis de Loja, Isabella's alarm was sufficient to arouse the Vatican to action. With the removal of Padre Rafaél, and the bestowal of the "Golden Rose of Faith and Virtue" upon the Queen by His Holiness, Pio Nono, the rumor quickly subsided, and was soon forgotten.
Whether because of this supposed secret Padre Rafaél was in favor at the court of Pio Nono's successor, we may not say. The man's character was quite enigmatical, and divulged nothing. But, if we may again appeal to rumor, he did appear to have influence in papal circles. And we are not sure that he did not seek to augment that influence by securing his irresolute little nephew to the Church. And yet, the sincerity of his devotion to the papacy cannot be questioned, as witness his services to Pius IX., "the first Christian to achieve infallibility," during the troublesome years of 1870-71, when the French débâcle all but scuttled the papal ship of state. And if now he sought to use his influence at the Vatican, we shall generously attribute it to his loyalty to Rincón traditions, and his genuine concern for the welfare of the little Josè, rather than to any desire to advance his own ecclesiastical status.
But, it may be asked, during the eight years of Josè's course in the seminary, did his tutors not mark the forces at work in the boy's soul? And if so, why did they not urge his dismissal as unfit for the calling of the priesthood?
Because, true to his promises, and stubbornly hugging the fetish of family pride, the boy gave but little indication during the first four years of his course of the heretical doubts and disbeliefs fermenting within his troubled mind. And when, after the death of his father and its consequent release of the flood of protest and mental disquiet so long pent up within him, the uncle returned to Rome with the lad to advise his instructors to bring extra pressure to bear upon him in order to convince him of the truths upon which the Church rested, Josè subsided again into his wonted attitude of placid endurance, even of partial acceptance of the religious tutelage, and seldom gave further sign of inner discord. Acting upon the suggestions of the uncle, Josè's instructors took special pains to parade before him the evidence and authorities supporting the claims of Holy Church and the grand tenets upon which the faith reposed. In particular were the arguments of Cardinal Newman cited to him, and the study of the latter's Apology was made a requirement of his course. The writings of the great Cardinal Manning also were laid before him, and he was told to find therein ample support for all assumptions of the Church.
Silently and patiently the boy to outward appearance acquiesced; but often the light of his midnight candle might have revealed a wan face, frowning and perplexed, while before him lay the Cardinal's argument for belief in the miraculous resuscitation of the Virgin Mary--the argument being that the story is a beautiful one, and a comfort to those pious souls who think it true!
Often, too, there lay before him the words of the great Newman:
"You may be taken away young; you may live to fourscore; you may die in your bed, or in the open field--but if Mary intercedes for you, that day will find you watching and ready. All things will be fixed to secure your salvation, all dangers will be foreseen, all obstacles removed, all aid provided."
And as often he would close the book and drop his head in wonder that a man so humanly great could believe in an infinite, omnipotent God amenable to influence, even to that of the sanctified Mary.
"The Christ said, 'These signs shall follow them that believe,'" he sometimes murmured, as he sat wrapped in study. "But do the Master's signs follow the Cardinals? Yet these men say they believe. What can they do that other men can not? Alas, nothing! What boots their sterile faith?"
The limitations with which the lad was hedged about in the Seminario quite circumscribed his existence there. All lay influences were carefully excluded, and he learned only what was selected for him by his teachers. Added to this narrowing influence was his promise to his mother that he would read nothing proscribed by the Church. Of Bible criticism, therefore, he might know nothing. For original investigation of authorities there was neither permission nor opportunity. He was taught to discount historical criticism, and to regard anarchy as the logical result of independence of thought. He was likewise impressed with the fact that he must not question the official acts of Holy Church.
"But," he once remonstrated, "it was by an ecumenical council--a group of frail human beings--that the Pope was declared infallible! And that only a few years ago!"
"The council but set its seal of affirmation to an already great and established fact," was the reply. "As the supreme teacher and definer of the Church of God no Pope has ever erred, nor ever can err, in the exposition of revealed truth."
"But Tito Cennini said in class but yesterday that many of the Popes had been wicked men!"
"You must learn to distinguish, my son, between the man and the office. No matter what the private life of a Pope may have been, the validity of his official acts is not thereby affected. Nor is the doctrine of the Church."
"But,--"
"Nay, my son; this is what the Church teaches; and to slight it is to emperil your soul."
But, despite his promises to his mother and the Archbishop, and in despite, too, of his own conscientious endeavor to keep every contaminating influence from entering his mind, he could not prevent this same Tito from assiduously cultivating his friendship, and voicing the most liberal and worldly opinions to him.
"Perdio, but you are an ignorant animal, Josè!" ejaculated the little rascal one day, entering Josè's room and throwing himself upon the bed. "Why, didn't you know that the Popes used to raise money by selling their pardons and indulgences? That fellow Tetzel, back in Luther's time, rated sacrilege at nine ducats, murder at seven, witchcraft at six, and so on. Ever since the time of Innocent VIII. immunity from purgatory could be bought. It was his chamberlain who used to say, 'God willeth not the death of a sinner, but that he should pay and live.' Ha! ha! Those were good old days, amico mío!"
But the serious Josè, to whom honor was a sacred thing, saw not his companion's cause for mirth. "Tito," he hazarded, "our instructor tells us that we must distinguish--"
"Ho! ho!" laughed the immodest Tito, "if the Apostolic virtue has been handed down from the great Peter through the long line of Bishops of Rome and later Popes, what happened to it when there were two or three Popes, in the Middle Ages? And which branch retained the unbroken succession? Of a truth, amico, you are very credulous!"
Josè looked at him horrified.
"And which branch now," continued the irrepressible Tito, "holds a monopoly of the Apostolic virtue, the Anglican Church, the Greek, or the Roman Catholic? For each claims it, and each regards its rival claimants as rank heretics."
Josè could not but dwell long and thoughtfully on this. Then, later, he again sought the graceless Tito. "Amico," he said eagerly, "why do not these claimants of the true Apostolic virtue seek to prove their claims, instead of, like pouting children, vainly spending themselves in denouncing their rivals?"
"Prove them!" shouted Tito. "And how, amico mío?"
"Why," returned Josè earnestly, "by doing the works the Apostles did; by healing the sick, and raising the dead, and--"
Tito answered with a mocking laugh. "Perdio, amico! know you not that if they submitted to such proof not one of the various contestants could substantiate his claims?"
"Then, oh, then how could the council declare the Pope to be infallible?"
Tito regarded his friend pityingly. "My wonder is, amico," he replied seriously, "that they did not declare him immortal as well. When you read the true history of those exciting days and learn something of the political intrigue with which the Church was then connected, you will see certain excellent reasons why the Holy Father should have been declared infallible. But let me ask you, amico, if you have such doubts, why are you here, of all places? Surely it is not your own life-purpose to become a priest!"
"My life-purpose," answered Josè meditatively, "is to find my soul--my real self."
Tito went away shaking his head. He could not understand such a character as that of Josè. But, for that matter, no one ever fathoms a fellow-being. And so we who have attempted a sketch of the boy's mentality will not complain if its complexity prevents us from adequately setting it forth. Rather shall we feel that we have accomplished much if we have shown that the lad had no slight justification for the budding seeds of religious doubt within his mind, and for concluding that of the constitution of God men know nothing, despite their fantastical theories and their bold affirmations, as if He were a man in their immediate neighborhood, with whom they were on the most intimate terms.
In the course of time Josè found the companionship of Tito increasingly unendurable, and so he welcomed the formation of another friendship among his mates, even though it was with a lad much older than himself, Bernardo Damiano, a candidate for ordination, and one thoroughly indoctrinated in the faith of Holy Church. With open and receptive heart our young Levite eagerly availed himself of his new friend's voluntary discourses on the mooted topics about which his own thought incessantly revolved.
"Fear not, Josè, to accept all that is taught you here," said Bernardo in kindly admonition; "for if this be not the very doctrine of the Christ himself, where else will you find it? Among the Protesters? Nay, they have, it is true, hundreds of churches; and they call themselves Christians. But their religion is as diverse as their churches are numerous, and it is not of God or Jesus Christ. They have impiously borrowed from us. Their emasculated creeds are only assumptions of human belief. They recognize no law of consistency, and so they enjoy unbridled license. They believe what they please, and each interprets Holy Writ to suit his own fantastical whims."
"But, the Popes--" began Josè, returning again to his troublesome topic.
"Yes, and what of them?" replied his friend calmly. "Can you not see beyond the human man to the Holy Office? The Holy Father is the successor of the great Apostle Peter, whom our blessed Saviour appointed his Vicar on earth, and constituted the supreme teacher and judge in matters of morals. Remember, Jesus Christ founded the Catholic religion! He established the Church, which he commanded all men to support and obey. That Church is still, and always will be, the infallible teacher of truth, for Jesus declared that it should never fall. Let not Satan lead you to the Protesters, Josè, for their creeds are but snares and pitfalls."
"I know nothing of Protestant creeds, nor want to," answered Josè. "If Jesus Christ established the Catholic religion, then I want to accept it, and shall conclude that my doubts and questionings are but the whisperings of Satan. But--"
"But what, my friend? The Popes again?" Bernardo laughed, and put his arm affectionately about the younger lad. "The Pope, Josè, is, always has been, and always will be, supreme, crowned with the triple crown as king of earth, and heaven, and hell. We mortals have not made him so. Heaven alone did that. God himself made our Pontiff of the Holy Catholic Church superior even to the angels; and if it were possible for them to believe contrary to the faith, he could judge them and lay the ban of excommunication upon them."
Josè's eyes widened while his friend talked. Was he losing his own senses? Or was it true, as his lamented father had said, that he had been cast under the spell of the devil's wiles? Had he been foreordained to destruction by his own heretical thought? For, if what he heard in Rome was truth, then was he damned, irrevocably!
"Come," said his friend, taking his arm; "let us go to the library and read the Credo of the Holy Father, Pius the Fourth, wherein is set forth in detail the doctrinal system of our beloved Church. And let me urge you, my dear young friend, to accept it, unreservedly, and be at peace, else will your life be a ceaseless torment."
Oh, that he could have done so! That he could have joined those thousands of faithful, loyal adherents to Holy Church, who find in its doctrines naught that stimulates a doubt, nor urges against the divine institution of its gorgeous, material fabric!
But, vain desire! "I cannot! I cannot!" he wailed in the dark hours of night upon his bed. "I cannot love a God who has to be prayed to by Saints and Virgin, and persuaded by them not to damn His own children! I cannot believe that the Pope, a mere human being, can canonize Saints and make spiritual beings who grant the prayers of men and intercede with God for them! Yes, I know there are multitudes of good people who believe and accept the doctrines of the Church. But, alas! I am not one of them, nor can be."
For, we repeat, the little Josè was morbidly honest. And this gave rise to fear, a corroding fear that he might not do right by his God, his mother, and himself, the three variants in his complex life-equation. His self-condemnation increased; yet his doubts kept pace with it. He more than ever distrusted his own powers after his first four years in the seminary. He more than ever lacked self-confidence. He was more than ever vacillating, hesitant, and infirm of purpose. He even at times, when under the pall of melancholia, wondered if he had really loved his deceased father, and whether it was real grief which he felt at his parent's demise. Often, too, when fear and doubt pressed heavily, and his companions avoided him because of the aura of gloom in which he dwelt, he wondered if he were becoming insane. He seemed to become obsessed with the belief that his ability to think was slowly paralyzing. And with it his will. And yet, proof that this was not the case was found in his stubborn opposition to trite acquiescence, and in his infrequent reversals of mood, when he would even feel an intense, if transient, sense of exaltation in the thought that he was doing the best that in him lay.
It was during one of these lighter moods, and at the close of a school year, that a great joy came to him in an event which left a lasting impress upon his life. Following close upon a hurried visit which his uncle paid to Rome, the boy was informed that it had been arranged for him to accompany the Papal Legate on a brief journey through Germany and England, returning through France, in order that he might gain a first-hand impression of the magnitude of the work which the Church was doing in the field, and meet some of her great men. The broadening, quieting, confidence-inspiring influence of such a journey would be, in the opinion of Padre Rafaél, incalculable. And so, with eager, bubbling hope, the lad set out.
Whatever it may have been intended that the boy should see on this ecclesiastical pilgrimage, he returned to Rome at the end of three months with his quick, impressionable mind stuffed with food for reflection. Though he had seen the glories of the Church, worshiped in her matchless temples, and sat at the feet of her great scholars, now in the quiet of his little room he found himself dwelling upon a single thought, into which all of his collected impressions were gathered: "The Church--Catholic and Protestant--is--oh, God, the Church is--not sick, not dying, but--dead! Aye, it has served both God and Mammon, and paid the awful penalty! And what is left? Caesarism!" The great German and British nations were not Catholic. But worse, the Protestant people of the German Empire were sadly indifferent to religion. He had seen, in Berlin, men of family trying to resell the Bibles which their children had used in preparation for confirmation. He had found family worship all but extinct. He had marked the widespread indifference among Protestant parents in regard to the religious instruction of their young. He had been told there that parents had but a slight conception of their duty as moral guides, and that children were growing up with only sensuous pleasures and material gain as their life-aims. Again and again he was shown where in whole districts it was utterly impossible to secure young men for ordination to the Protestant ministry. And he was furnished with statistics setting forth the ominous fact that within a few years, were the present decline unchecked, there would be no students in the Protestant universities of the country.
"Do you not see in this, my son," said the Papal Legate, "the blight of unbelief? Do you not mark the withering effects of the modern so-called scientific thought? What think you of a religion wherein the chief interest centers in trials for heresy; whose ultimate effect upon human character is a return to the raw, primitive, immature sense of life that once prevailed among this great people? What think you now of Luther and his diabolical work?"
The wondering boy hung his head without reply. Would Germany at length come to the true fold? And was that fold the Holy Catholic Church?
And England--ah! there was the Anglican church, Catholic, but not Roman, and therefore but a counterfeit of the Lord's true Church. Would it endure? "No," the Legate had said; "already defection has set in, and the prodigal's return to the loving parent in Rome is but a matter of time."
Then came his visit to the great abbey of Westminster, and the impression which, to his last earthly day, he bore as one of his most sacred treasures. There in the famous Jerusalem Chamber he had sat, his eyes suffused with tears and his throat choked with emotion. In that room the first Lancastrian king long years before had closed his unhappy life. There the great Westminster Confession had been framed. There William of Orange had held his weighty discussion of the Prayer-Book revision, which was hoped to bring Churchmen and Dissenters again into harmony. And there, greatest of all, had gathered, day after day, and year after year, the patient, devoted group of men who gave to the world its Revised Edition of the Holy Bible, only a few brief years ago. As the rapt Josè closed his eyes and listened to the whispered conversation of the scholarly men about him, he seemed to see the consecrated Revisers, seated again at the long table, deep in the holy search of the Scriptures for the profound secrets of life which they hold. He saw with what sedulous care they pursued their sacred work, without trace of prejudice or religious bias, and with only the selfless purpose always before them to render to mankind a priceless benefit in a more perfect rendition of the Word of God. Why could not men come together now in that same generous spirit of love? But no, Rome would never yield her assumptions. But when the lad rose and followed his guides from the room, it was with a new-born conviction, and a revival of his erstwhile firm purpose to translate for himself, at the earliest opportunity, the Greek Testament, if, perchance, he might find thereby what his yearning soul so deeply craved, the truth.
That the boy was possessed of scholarly instincts, there could be no doubt. His ability had immediately attracted his instructors on entering the seminary. And, but for his stubborn opposition to dogmatic acceptance without proofs, he might have taken and maintained the position of leader in scholarship in the institution. Literature and the languages, particularly Greek, were his favorite studies, and in these he excelled. Even as a child, long before the eventful night when his surreptitious reading of Voltaire precipitated events, he had determined to master Greek, and some day to translate the New Testament from the original sources into his beloved Castilian tongue. Before setting out for Rome he had so applied himself to the worn little grammar which the proprietor of the bookstall in Seville had loaned him, that he was able to make translations with comparative fluency. In the seminary he plunged into it with avidity; and when he returned from his journey with the Papal Legate he began in earnest his translation of the Testament. This, like so much of the boy's work and writing, was done secretly and in spare moments. And his zeal was such that often in the middle of the night it would compel him to rise and, after drawing the shades carefully and stopping the crack under the door with his cassock, light his candle and dig away at his Testament until dawn.
This study of the New Testament in the Greek resulted in many translations differing essentially from the accepted version, as could not but happen when a mind so original as that of the boy Josè was concentrated upon it. His first stumbling block was met in the prayer of Jesus in an attempt to render the petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," into idiomatic modern thought. The word translated "daily" was not to be found elsewhere in the Greek language. Evidently the Aramaic word which Jesus employed, and of which this Greek word was a translation, must have been an unusual one--a coined expression. And what did it mean? No one knows. Josè found means to put the question to his tutor. He was told that it doubtless meant "super-supernal." But what could "super-supernal" convey to the world's multitude of hungry suppliants for the bread of life! And so he rendered the phrase "Give us each day a better understanding of Thee." Again, going carefully through his Testament the boy crossed out the words translated "God," and in their places substituted "divine influence." Many of the best known and most frequently quoted passages suffered similarly radical changes at his hands. For the translation "truth," the boy often preferred to substitute "reality"; and such passages as "speaking the truth in love" were rendered by him, "lovingly speaking of those things which are real." "Faith" and "belief" were generally changed to "understanding" and "real knowing," so that the passage, "O ye of little faith," became in his translation, "O ye of slight understanding." The word "miracle" he consistently changed to "sign" throughout. The command to ask "in the name of Jesus" caused him hours of deep and perplexing thought, until he hit upon the, to him, happy rendering, "in his character." Why not? In the character of the Christ mankind might ask anything and it would be given them. But to acquire that character men must repent. And the Greek word "metanoia," so generally rendered "repentance," would therefore have to be translated "radical and complete change of thought." Again, why not? Was not a complete change of thought requisite if one were to become like Jesus? Could mortals think continually of murder, warfare, disaster, failure, crime, sickness and death, and of the acquisition of material riches and power, and still hope to acquire the character of the meek but mighty Nazarene? Decidedly no! And so he went on delving and plodding, day after day, night after night, substituting and changing, but always, even if unconsciously, giving to the Scripture a more metaphysical and spiritual meaning, which displaced in its translation much of the material and earthy.
Before the end of his seminary training the translation was complete. What a new light it seemed to throw upon the mission of Jesus! How fully he realized now that creeds and confessions had never even begun to sound the profound depths of the Bible! What a changed message it seemed to carry for mankind! How he longed to show it to his preceptors and discuss it with them! But his courage failed when he faced this thought. However, another expedient presented: he would write a treatise on the New Testament, embodying the salient facts of his translation, and send it out into the world for publication in the hope that it might do much good. Again, night after night in holy zeal he toiled on the work, and when completed, sent it, under his name, to a prominent literary magazine published in Paris.
Its appearance--for it was accepted eagerly by the editor, who was bitterly hostile to the Church--caused a stir in ecclesiastical circles and plunged the unwise lad into a sea of trouble. The essay in general might have been excusable on its distinct merits and the really profound scholarship exhibited in its composition. But when the boy, a candidate for holy orders, and almost on the eve of his ordination, seized upon the famous statement of Jesus in which he is reported to have told Peter that he was the rock upon which the Lord's church should be eternally founded, and showed that Jesus called Peter a stone, "petros," a loose stone, and one of many, whereas he then said that his church should be founded upon "petra," the living, immovable rock of truth, thus corroborating Saint Augustine, but confuting other supposedly impregnable authority for the superiority and infallibility of the Church, it was going a bit too far.
The result was severe penance, coupled with soul-searing reprimand, and absolute prohibition of further original writing. His translation of the Testament was confiscated, and he was commanded to destroy all notes referring to it, and to refrain from making further translations. His little room was searched, and all references and papers which might be construed as unevangelical were seized and burned. He was then transferred to another room for the remainder of his seminary course, and given a roommate, a cynical, sneering bully of Irish descent, steeped to the core in churchly doctrine, who did not fail to embrace every opportunity to make the suffering penitent realize that he was in disgrace and under surveillance. The effect was to drive the sensitive boy still further into himself, and to augment the sullenness of disposition which had earlier characterized him and separated him from social intercourse with the world in which he moved apart from his fellow-men.
Thus had Josè been shown very clearly that implicit obedience would at all times be exacted from him by the Church. He had been shown quite unmistakably that an inquisitive and determined spirit would not be tolerated if it led to deductions at variance with accepted tradition. He might starve mentally, if his prescribed food did not satisfy his hunger; but he must understand, once for all, that truth had long since been revealed, and that it was not within his province to attempt any further additions to the revelation.
Once more, for the sake of his mother, and that he might learn all that the Church had to teach him, the boy conscientiously tried to obey. He was reminded again that, though taught to obey, he was being trained to lead. This in a sense pleased him, as offering surcease from an erking sense of responsibility. Nevertheless, though he constantly wavered in decision; though at times the Church won him, and he yielded temporarily to her abundant charms; the spirit of protest did wax steadily stronger within him as the years passed. Back and forth he swung, like a pendulum, now drawn by the power and influence of the mighty Church; now, as he approached it, repelled by the things which were revealed as he drew near. In the last two years of his course his soul-revolt often took the form of open protest to his preceptors against indulgences and the sacramental graces, against the arbitrary Index Expurgatorius, and the Church's stubborn opposition to modern progression. Like Faust, his studies were convincing him more and more firmly of the emptiness of human hypotheses and undemonstrable philosophy. The growing conviction that the Holy Church was more worldly than spiritual filled his shrinking soul at times with horror. The limiting thought of Rome was often stifling to him. He had begun to realize that liberty of thought and conscience were his only as he received it already outlined from the Church. Even his interpretation of the Bible must come from her. His very ideas must first receive the ecclesiastical stamp before he might advance them. His opinions must measure up--or down--to those of his tutors, ere he might even hold them. In terror he felt that the Church was absorbing him, heart and mind. His individuality was seeping away. In time he would become but a link in the great worldly system which he was being trained to serve.
These convictions did not come to him all at once, nor were they as yet firmly fixed. They were rather suggestions which became increasingly insistent as the years went on. He had entered the seminary at the tender age of twelve, his mind wholly unformed, but protesting even then. All through his course he had sought what there was in Christianity upon which he could lay firm hold. In the Church he had found an ultra-conservative spirit and extreme reverence for authority. Tito had told him that it was the equivalent of ancestor-worship. But when he one day told his instructors that he was not necessarily a disbeliever in the Scriptures because he did not accept their interpretation of them, he could not but realize that Tito had come dangerously near the truth. His translation of the Greek Testament had forced him to the conclusion that much of the material contained in the Gospels was not Jesus' own words, but the commentaries of his reporters; not the Master's diction, but theological lecturing by the writers of the Gospels. Moreover, in the matter of prayer, especially, he was all at sea. As a child he had spent hours formulating humble, fervent petitions, which did not seem to draw replies. And so there began to form within his mind a concept, faint and ill-defined, of a God very different from that canonically accepted. He tried to believe that there was a Creator back of all things, but that He was inexorable Law. And the lad was convinced that, somehow, he had failed to get into harmony with that infinite Law. But, in that case, why pray to Law? And, most foolish of all, why seek to influence it, whether through Virgin or Saint? And, if God is a good Father, why ask Him to be good? Then, to his insistent question, "Unde Deus?" he tried to formulate the answer that God is Spirit, and omnipresent. But, alas! that made the good God include evil. No, there was a terrible human misunderstanding of the divine nature, a woeful misinterpretation. He must try to ask for light in the character of the Christ. But then, how to assume that character? Like a garment? Impossible! "Oh, God above," he wailed aloud again and again, "I don't know what to believe! I don't know what to think!" Foolish lad! Why did he think at all, when there were those at hand to relieve him of that onerous task?
And so, at last, Josè sought to resign himself to his fate, and, thrusting aside these mocking questions, accept the opportunities for service which his tutors so wisely emphasized as the Church's special offering to him. He yielded to their encouragement to plunge heartily into his studies, for in such absorption lay diversion from dangerous channels of thought. Slowly, too, he yielded to their careful insistence that he must suffer many things to be so for the nonce, even as Jesus did, lest a too radical resistance now should delay the final glorious consummation.
Was the boy actuated too strongly by the determination that his widowed mother's hopes should never be blasted by any assertion of his own will? Was he passively permitting himself to be warped and twisted into a minion of an institution alien to his soul in bigoted adherence to his morbid sense of integrity? Was he for the present countenancing a lie, rather than permit the bursting of a bomb which would rend the family and bring his beloved mother in sorrow to the grave? Or was he biding his time, an undeveloped David, who would some day sally forth like the lion of the tribe of Juda, to match his moral courage against the blustering son of Anak? Time only would tell. The formative period of his character was not yet ended, and the data for prognostication were too complex and conflicting. We can only be sure that his consuming desire to know had been carefully fostered in the seminary, but in such a manner as unwittingly to add to his confusion of thought and to increase his fear of throwing himself unreservedly upon his own convictions. That he grew to perceive the childishness of churchly dogma, we know. That he appreciated the Church's insane license of affirmation, its impudent affirmations of God's thoughts and desires, its coarse assumptions of knowledge of the inner workings of the mind of Omnipotence, we likewise know. But, on the other hand, we know that he feared to break with the accepted faith. The claims of Protestantism, though lacking the pomp and pageantry of Catholicism to give them attractiveness, offered him an interpretation of Christ's mission that was little better than the teachings he was receiving. And so his hesitant and vacillating nature, which hurled him into the lists to-day as the resolute foe of dogma and superstition, and to-morrow would leave him weak and doubting at the feet of the enemy, kept him wavering, silent and unhappy, on the thin edge of resolution throughout the greater part of his course. His lack of force, or the holding of his force in check by his filial honesty and his uncertainty of conviction, kept him in the seminary for eight years, during which his being was slowly, imperceptibly descending into him. At the age of twenty he was still unsettled, but further than even he himself realized from Rome. Who shall say that he was not at the same time nearer to God?
On the day that he was twenty, three things of the gravest import happened to the young Josè. His warm friend, Bernardo, died suddenly, almost in his arms; his uncle, Rafaél de Rincón, paid an unexpected visit to the Vatican; and the lad received the startling announcement that he would be ordained to the priesthood on the following day.
The sudden demise of the young Bernardo plunged Josè into an excess of grief and again encompassed him with the fear and horror of death. He shut himself up in his room, and toward the close of the day took his writing materials and penned a passionate appeal to his mother, begging her to absolve him from his promises, and let him go out into the world, a free man in search of truth. But scarcely had he finished his letter when he was summoned into the Rector's office. There it was explained to him that, in recognition of his high scholarship, of his penitence and loyal obedience since the Testament episode, and of the advanced work which he was now doing in the seminary and the splendid promise he was giving, the Holy Father had been asked to grant a special indult, waiving the usual age requirement and permitting the boy to be ordained with the class which was to receive the holy order of the priesthood the following day. It was further announced that after ordination he should spend a year in travel with the Papal Legate, and on his return might enter the office of the Papal Secretary of State, as an under-secretary, or office assistant. While there, he would be called upon to teach in the seminary, and later might be sent to the University to pursue higher studies leading to the degree of Doctor.
Before the boy had awakened to his situation, the day of his ordination arrived. The proud mother, learning from the secretary of the precipitation of events, and doting on the boy whom she had never understood; in total ignorance of the complex elements of his soul, and little realizing that between her and her beloved son there was now a gulf fixed which would never be bridged, saw only the happy fruition of a life ambition. Fortunately she had been kept in ignorance of the dubious incident of the Testament translation and its results upon the boy; and when the long anticipated day dawned her eyes swam in tears of hallowed joy. The Archbishop and his grim secretary each congratulated the other heartily, and the latter, breaking into one of his rare smiles, murmured gratefully, "At last! And our enemies have lost a champion!"
The night before the ordination Josè had begged to occupy a room alone. The appeal which emanated from his sad face, his thin and stooping body, his whole drawn and tortured being, would have melted flint. His request was granted. Throughout the night the boy, on his knees beside the little bed, wrestled with the emotions which were tearing his soul. Despondency lay over him like a pall. A vague presentiment of impending disaster pressed upon him like a millstone. Ceaselessly he weighed and reviewed the forces which had combined to drive him into the inconsistent position which he now occupied. Inconsistent, for his highest ideal had been truth. He was by nature consecrated to it. He had sought it diligently in the Church, and now that he was about to become her priest he could not make himself believe that he had found it. Now, when bound to her altars, he faced a life of deception, of falsehood, as the champion of a faith which he could not unreservedly embrace.
But he had accepted his education from the Church; and would he shrink from making payment therefor? Yet, on the other hand, must he sacrifice honor--yea, his whole future--to the payment of a debt forced upon him before he had reached the age of reason? The oath of ordination, the priest's oath, echoed in his throbbing ears like a soul-sentence to eternal doom; while spectral shades of moving priests and bishops, laying cold and unfeeling hands upon him, sealing him to endless servitude to superstition and deception, glided to and fro through the darkness before his straining eyes. Could he receive the ordination to-morrow? He had promised--but the assumption of its obligations would brand his shrinking soul with torturing falsehood! If he sank under doubt and fear, could he still retract? What then of his mother and his promise to her? What of the Rincón honor and pride? Living disgrace, or a living lie--which? Sacrifice of self--or mother? God knew, he had never deliberately countenanced a falsehood--yet, through circumstances which he did not have the will to control, he was a living one!
Fair visions of a life untrammeled by creed or religious convention hovered at times that night before his mental gaze. He saw a cottage, rose-bowered, glowing in the haze of the summer sun. He saw before its door a woman, fresh and fair--his wife--and children--his--shouting their joyous greetings as they trooped out to welcome him returning from his day's labors. How he clung to this picture when it faded and left him, an oath-bound celibate, facing his lonely and cheerless destiny! God! what has the Church to offer for such sacrifice as this! An education? Yea, an induction into relative truths and mortal opinions, and the sad record of the devious wanderings of the human mind! An opportunity for service? God knows, the free, unhampered mind, open to truth and progress, loosed from mediaeval dogma and ignorant convention, seeing its brothers' needs and meeting in them its own, has opportunities for rich service to-day outside the Church the like of which have never before been offered!
To and fro his heaving thought ebbed and flowed. Back and forth the arguments, pro and con, surged through the still hours of the night. After all, had he definite proof that the tenets of Holy Church were false? No, he could not honestly say that he had. The question still stood in abeyance. Even his conviction of their falsity at times had sorely wavered. And if his heart cried out against their acceptance, it nevertheless had nothing tangibly definite to offer in substitution. But--the end had come so suddenly! With his life free and untrammeled he might yet find the truth. Oath-bound and limited to the strictures of the Church, what hope was there but the acceptance of prescribed canons of human belief? Still, the falsities which he believed he had found within the Church were not greater than those against which she herself fought in the world. And if she accepted him, did it not indicate on her part a tacit recognition of the need of just what he had to offer, a searching spirit of inquiry and consecration to the unfoldment of truth? Alas! the incident of the Greek translation threw its shadow of doubt upon that hope.
But if the Church accepted him, she must accept his stand! He would raise his voice in protest, and would continually point to the truth as he discerned it! If he received the order of priesthood from her it was with the understanding that his acceptance of her tenets was tentative! But--forlorn expedient! He knew something of ecclesiastical history. He thought he knew--young as he was--that the Church stood not for progress, not for conformity to changing ideals, not for alignment with the world's great reforms, but for herself, first, midst, and last!
Thus the conflict raged, while thoughts, momentous for even a mature thinker, tore through the mind of this lad of twenty. Prayers for light--prayers which would have rent the heart of an Ivan--burst at times from the feverish lips of this child of circumstance. Infinite Father--Divine Influence--Spirit of Love--whatever Thou art--wilt Thou not illumine the thought-processes of this distracted youth and thus provide the way of escape from impending destruction? Can it be Thy will that this fair mind shall be utterly crushed? Do the agonized words of appeal which rise to Thee from his riven soul fall broken against ears of stone?
"Occupy till I come!" Yea, beloved Master, he hears thy voice and strives to obey--but the night is filled with terror--the clouds of error lower about him--the storm bursts--and thou art not there!
Day dawned. A classmate, sent to summon the lad, roused him from the fitful sleep into which he had sunk on the cold floor. His mind was no longer active. Dumbly following his preceptors at the appointed hour, he proceeded with the class to the chapel. Dimly conscious of his surroundings, his thought befogged as if in a dream, his eyes half-blinded by the gray haze which seemed to hang before them, he celebrated the Mass, like one under hypnosis, received the holy orders, and assumed the obligations which constituted him a priest of Holy Church.
Chapter 8
On a sweltering midsummer afternoon, a year after the events just related, Rome lay panting for breath and counting the interminable hours which must elapse before the unpitying sun would grant her a short night's respite from her discomfort. Her streets were deserted by all except those whose affairs necessitated their presence in them. Her palaces and villas had been abandoned for weeks by their fortunate owners, who had betaken themselves to the seashore or to the more distance resorts of the North. The few inexperienced tourists whose lack of practical knowledge in the matter of globe-trotting had brought them into the city so unseasonably were hastily and indignantly assembling their luggage and completing arrangements to flee from their over-warm reception.
In a richly appointed suite of the city's most modern and ultra-fashionable hotel two maids, a butler, and the head porter were packing and removing a formidable array of trunks and suit cases, while a woman of considerably less than middle age, comely in person and tastefully attired in a loose dressing gown of flowered silk, alternated between giving sharp directions to the perspiring workers and venting her abundant wrath and disappointment upon the chief clerk, as with evident reluctance she filled one of a number of signed checks to cover the hotel expenses of herself and servants for a period of three weeks, although they had arrived only the day before and, on account of the stifling heat, were leaving on the night express for Lucerne. The clerk regretted exceedingly, but on Madam Ames' order the suite had been held vacant for that length of time, during which the management had daily looked for her arrival, and had received no word of her delay. Had Madam herself not just admitted that she had altered her plans en route, without notifying the hotel, and had gone first to the Italian lakes, without cancelling her order for the suite? And so her sense of justice must convince her that the management was acting wholly within its rights in making this demand.
While the preparations for departure were in progress the woman's two children played about the trunks and raced through the rooms and adjoining corridor with a child's indifference to climatal conditions.
"Let's ring for the elevator and then hide, Sidney!" suggested the girl, as she panted after her brother, who had run to the far end of the long hall.
"No, Kathleen, it wouldn't be right," objected the boy.
"Right! Ho! ho! What's the harm, goody-goody? Go tell mother, if you want to!" she called after him, as he started back to their rooms. Refusing to accompany him, the girl leaned against the balustrade of a stairway which led to the floor below and watched her brother until he disappeared around a turn of the corridor.
"Baby!" burst from her pouting lips. "'Fraid of everything! It's no fun playing with him!" Then, casting a glance of inquiry about her, "I'd just like to hide down these stairs. Mother and nurse never let me go where I want to."
Obeying the impulse stimulated by her freedom for the moment, the child suddenly turned and darted down the stairway. On the floor beneath she found herself at the head of a similar stairway, down which she likewise hurried, with no other thought than to annoy her brother, who was sure to be sent in search of her when her mother discovered her absence. Opening the door below, the child unexpectedly found herself in an alley back of the hotel.
Her sense of freedom was exhilarating. The sunlit alley beckoned to a delightful journey of discovery. With a happy laugh and a toss of her yellow curls she hurried along the narrow way and into the street which crossed it a short distance beyond. Here she paused and looked in each direction, uncertain which way to continue. In one direction, far in the distance, she saw trees. They looked promising; she would go that way. And trotting along the blazing, deserted street, she at length reached the grateful shade and threw herself on the soft grass beneath, tired and panting, but happy in the excitement of her little adventure.
Recovering quickly, the child rose to explore her environment. She was in one of those numerous public parks lining the Tiber and forming the city's playground for her less fortunate wards. Here and there were scattered a few people, mostly men, who had braved the heat of the streets in the hope of obtaining a breath of cool air near the water. At the river's edge a group of ragged urchins were romping noisily; and on a bench near them a young priest sat, writing in a notebook. As she walked toward them a beggar roused himself from the grass and looked covetously through his evil eyes at the child's rich clothes.
The gamins stopped their play as the girl approached, and stared at her in expectant curiosity. One of them, a girl of apparently her own age, spoke to her, but in a language which she did not understand. Receiving no reply, the urchins suddenly closed together, and holding hands, began to circle around her, shouting like little Indians.
The child stood for a moment perplexed. Then terror seized her. Hurling herself through the circle, she fled blindly, with the gamins in pursuit. With no sense of direction, her only thought to escape from the dirty band at her heels, she rushed straight to the river and over the low bank into the sluggish, yellow water. A moment later the priest who had been sitting on the bench near the river, startled by the frenzied cries of the now frightened children, rushed into the shallow water and brought the girl in safety to the bank.
Speaking to her in her own language, the priest sought to soothe the child and learn her identity as he carried her to the edge of the park and out into the street. But his efforts were unavailing. She could only sob hysterically and call piteously for her mother. A civil guard appeared at the street corner, and the priest summoned him. But scarcely had he reported the details of the accident when, suddenly uttering a cry, the priest thrust the girl into the arms of the astonished officer and fled back to the bench where he had been sitting. Another cry escaped him when he reached it. Throwing himself upon the grass, he searched beneath the bench and explored the ground about it. Then, his face blanched with fear, he rose and traversed the entire park, questioning every occupant. The gamins who had caused the accident had fled. The beggar, too, had disappeared. The park was all but deserted. Returning again to the bench, the priest sank upon it and buried his head in his hands, groaning aloud. A few minutes later he abruptly rose and, glancing furtively around as if he feared to be seen, hastened out to the street. Then, darting into a narrow crossroad, he disappeared in the direction of the Vatican.
At midnight, Padre Josè de Rincón was still pacing the floor of his room, frantic with apprehension. At the same hour, the small girl who had so unwittingly plunged him into the gravest danger was safely asleep in her mother's arms on the night express, which shrieked and thundered on its way to Lucerne.
Chapter 9
Always as a child Josè had been the tortured victim of a vague, unformed apprehension of impending disaster, a presentiment that some day a great evil would befall him. The danger before which he now grew white with fear seemed to realize that fatidic thought, and hang suspended above him on a filament more tenuous than the hair which held aloft the fabled sword of Damocles. That filament was the slender chance that the notebook with which he was occupied when the terrified child precipitated herself into the river, and which he had hastily dropped on seeing her plight and rushing to the rescue, had been picked up by those who would consider its value nil as an instrument of either good or evil. Before the accident occurred he had been absorbed in his writing and was unaware of other occupants of the park than himself and the children, whose boisterous romping in such close proximity had scarce interrupted his occupation. Then their frightened cries roused him to an absorbing sense of the girl's danger. Nor did he think again of the notebook until he was relating the details of the accident to the guard at the edge of the park, when, like a blow from above, the thought of it struck him.
Trembling with dread anticipation, he had hurried back to the bench, only to find his fears realized. The book had disappeared! His frenzied search yielded no hint of its probable mode of removal. Overcome by a sickening sense of misfortune, he had sunk upon the bench in despair. But fear again roused him and drove him, slinking like a hunted beast, from the park--fear that the possessor of the book, appreciating its contents, but with no thought of returning it, might be hovering near, with the view of seeing what manner of priest it could be who would thus carelessly leave such writings as these in the public parks and within the very shadow of St. Peter's.
But to escape immediate identification as their author did not remove his danger. Their character was such that, should they fall into certain hands, his identity must surely be established. Even though his name did not appear, they abounded in references which could hardly fail to point to him. But, far worse, they cited names of personages high in political and ecclesiastical circles in references which, should they become public, must inevitably set in motion forces whose far-reaching and disastrous effects he dared not even imagine.
For the notebook contained the soul-history of the man. It was the journal intime which he had begun as a youth, and continued and amplified through succeeding years. It was the repository of his inmost thoughts, the receptacle of his secret convictions. It held, crystallized in writing, his earliest protests against the circumstances which were molding his life. It voiced the subsequent agonized outpourings of his soul when the holy order of priesthood was conferred upon him. It recorded his views of life, of religion, of the cosmos. It held in burning words his thoughts anent the Holy Catholic faith--his sense of its virtues, its weaknesses, its assumptions, its fallacies. It set forth his confession of helplessness before circumstances too strong for his feeble will, and it cited therewith, as partial justification for his conduct, his tender love for his mother and his firm intention of keeping forever inviolable his promises to her. It voiced his passionate prayers for light, and his dim hopes for the future, while portraying the wreck of a life whose elements had been too complex for him to sift and classify and combine in their normal proportions.
A year had passed since the unhappy lad had opened his mouth to receive the iron bit which Destiny had pressed so mercilessly against it. During that time the Church had conscientiously carried out her program as announced to him just prior to his ordination. Associated with the Papal Legate, he had traveled extensively through Europe, his impressionable mind avidly absorbing the customs, languages, and thought-processes of many lands. At Lourdes he had stood in deep meditation before the miraculous shrine, surrounded with its piles of discarded canes and crutches, and wondered what could be the principle, human or divine, that had effected such cures. In Naples he had witnessed the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. He had seen the priests pass through the great assemblage with the little vial in which the red clot slowly dissolved into liquid before their credulous eyes; and he had turned away that they might not mark his flush of shame. In the Cathedral at Cologne he had gazed long at the supposed skulls of the three Magi who had worshipped at the rude cradle of the Christ. Set in brilliant jewels, in a resplendent gilded shrine, these whitened relics, which Bishop Reinald is believed to have discovered in the twelfth century, seemed to mock him in the very boldness of the pious fraud which they externalized. Was the mystery of the Christ involved in such deceit as this? And perpetrated by his Church? In unhappy Ireland he had been forced to the conviction that misdirected religious zeal must some day urge the sturdy Protesters of the North into armed conflict with their Catholic brothers of the South in another of those deplorable religious--nay, rather, theological--conflicts which have stained the earth with human blood in the name of the Prince of Peace. It was all incomprehensible to him, incongruous, and damnably wicked. Why could not they come together to submit their creeds, their religious beliefs and tenets, to the test of practical demonstration, and then discard those which world-history has long since shown inimical to progress and happiness? Paul urged this very thing when he wrote, "Prove all things; hold fast to that which is good." But, alas! the human doctrine of infallibility now stood squarely in the way.
From his travels with the Legate, Josè returned to Rome, burning with the holy desire to lend his influence to the institution of those reforms within the Church of which now he so clearly saw the need. Savonarola had burned with this same selfless desire to reform the Church from within. And his life became the forfeit. But the present age was perforce more tolerant; and was likewise wanting in those peculiar political conditions which had combined with the religious issue to send the great reformer to a martyr's death.
As Josè entered Rome he found the city in a state of turmoil. The occasion was the march of the Catholic gymnastic associations from the church where they had heard the Mass to St. Peter's, where they were to be received by the Holy Father. Cries of "Long live free-thinking!" were issuing from the rabble which followed hooting in the wake of the procession. To these were retorted, "Viva il Papa Re!" Josè had been caught in the mêlée, and, but for the interference of the civil authorities, might have suffered bodily injury. With his corporeal bruises he now bore away another ineffaceable mental impression. Were the Italian patriots justified in their hostility toward the Vatican? Had United Italy come into existence with the support of the Papacy, or in despite of it? Would the Church forever set herself against freedom of thought? Always seek to imprison the human mind? Was her unreasonably stubborn attitude directly accountable for the presence of atheism in the place, of all places, where her own influence ought to be most potent, the city of St. Peter?
For reasons which he could only surmise--perhaps because of his high scholarship--perhaps because of his remarkable memory, which constituted him a living encyclopedia in respect of all that entered it--Josè was now installed in the office of the Papal Secretary of State as an office assistant. He had received the appointment with indifference, for he was wholly devoid of ecclesiastical ambition. And yet it was with a sense of relief that he now felt assured of a career in the service of the Administrative Congregation of the Church, and for all time removed from the likelihood of being relegated to the performance of merely priestly functions. He therefore prepared to bide his time, and patiently to await opportunities to lend his willing support to the uplift of the Church and his fellow-men.
The limitations with which he had always been hedged about had not permitted the lad to know much, if anything, of the multitude of books on religious and philosophical subjects annually published throughout the world; and his oath of obedience would have prevented him from reading them if he had. But he saw no reason why, as part preparation for his work of moral uplift, he should not continue to seek, at first hand, the answer to the world-stirring query, What does the Bible mean? If God gave it, if the theory of verbal inspiration is correct, and if it is infallible, why then was it necessary to revise it, as had been done in the wonderful Jerusalem Chamber which he had once visited? Were those of his associates justified who had scoffed at that work, and, with a sneer on their lips, voiced the caustic query, "Fools! Why don't they let the Bible alone?" If the world is to be instructed out of the old sensual theology, does the Bible contain the truth with which to replace it? For to tear down an ideal without substituting for it a better one is nothing short of criminal. And so Josè plunged deeply into the study of Scriptural sources.
He had thought the rich treasures of the Vatican library unrestrictedly open to him, and he therefore brought his fine Latin and Greek scholarship to bear on its oldest uncial manuscripts. He began the study of Hebrew, that he might later read the Talmud and the ancient Jewish rabbinical lore. He pursued unflaggingly his studies of the English, French, and German languages, that he might search for the truth crystallized in those tongues. As his work progressed, the flush of health came to his cheeks. His eyes reflected the consuming fire which glowed in his eager soul. As he labored, he wrote; and his discoveries and meditations all found lodgment in his sole confidant, his journal.
If the Church knew what Christianity was, then Josè was forced to admit that he did not. He, weak, frail, fallible, remit sins? Preposterous! What was the true remission of sins but their utter destruction? He change the wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Jesus? Nay, he was no spiritual thaumaturgus! He could not do even the least of the works of the Master, despite his priestly character! Yet, it was not he, but the Christ, operating through him as a channel, who performed the work. Then why did not the Christ through him heal the sick and raise the dead? "Nay," he deplored, as he bent over his task, "the Church may teach that the bones, the teeth, the hair, and other human relics of canonized Saints can heal the sick--but even the Cardinals and the Holy Father when they fall ill demand the services, not of these, but of earthly physicians. They seek not the Christ-healing then; nor can they by their boasted powers heal themselves."
Israel's theme was: Righteousness is salvation. But Josè knew not how to define righteousness. Surely it did not mean adherence to human creeds! It was vastly more than observance of forms! "God is a spirit," he read; "and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." Then, voicing his own comments, "Why, then, this crass materializing of worship? Are images of Saviour, Virgin, and Saint necessary to excite the people to devotion? Nay, would not the healing of the sick, the restoration of sight to the blind, and the performance of the works of the Master by us priests do more than wooden or marble images to lead men to worship? Proof! proof! proof! 'Show us your works, and we will show you our faith,' cry the people. 'Then will we no longer sacrifice our independence of thought to the merciless tyranny of human tradition.'" And he knew that this related to Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Mohammedan alike.
One day a Cardinal, passing through the library, saw the diligent student at work, and paused to inquire into his labors. "And what do you seek, my son?" was the kindly query of the aged churchman.
"Scriptural justification for the fundamental tenets of our faith," Josè replied quickly, carried away by his soul's animation.
"And you find it, without doubt?"
"Nay, Father, except through what is, to me, unwarranted license and assumption."
The Cardinal silently continued his way. But permission to translate further from the Vatican manuscripts was that day withdrawn from Josè.
Again the youth lapsed into his former habit of moody revery. Shackled and restless, driven anew into himself, he increasingly poured his turbulent thought into his journal, not for other and profane eyes to read--hardly, either, for his own reference--but simply because he must have some outlet for the expression of his heaving mind. He turned to it, as he had in other crises in his life, when his pent soul cried out for some form of relief. He began to revise the record of the impressions received on his travels with the Papal Legate. He recorded conversations and impressions of scenes and people which his abnormally developed reticence would not permit him to discuss verbally with his associates. He embodied his protests against the restrictions of ecclesiastical authority. And he noted, too, many a protest against the political, rather than religious, character of much of the business transacted in the office to which he was attached. In the discharge of his ordinary duties he necessarily became acquainted with much of the inner administrative polity of the Vatican, and thus at times he learned of policies which stirred his alien soul to revolt. In his inferior position he could not hope to raise his voice in protest against these measures which excited his indignation; but in the loneliness of his room, or on his frequent long walks after office hours, he was wont to brood over them until his mind became surcharged and found relief only in emptying itself into this journal. And often on summer days, when the intense heat rendered his little room in the dormitory uninhabitable, he would take his books and papers to some one of the smaller parks lining the Tiber, and there would lose himself in study and meditation and the recording of the ceaseless voicing of his lonely soul.
On this particular afternoon, however, his mind had been occupied with matters of more than ordinary import. It happened that a Bishop from the United States had arrived in Rome the preceding day to pay his decennial visit to the Vatican and report on the spiritual condition of his diocese. While awaiting the return of the Papal Secretary, he had engaged in earnest conversation with a Cardinal-Bishop of the Administrative Congregation, in a small room adjoining the one where Josè was occupied with his clerical duties. The talk had been animated, and the heavy tapestry at the door had not prevented much of it from reaching the ears of the young priest and becoming fixed in his retentive memory.
"While I feel most keenly the persecution to which the Church must submit in the United States," the Bishop had said, "nevertheless Your Eminence will admit that there is some ground for complaint in the conduct of certain of her clergy. It is for the purpose of removing such vantage ground from our critics that I again urge an investigation of American priests, with the view of improving their moral status."
"You say, 'persecution to which the Church must submit.' Is that quite true?" returned the Cardinal-Bishop. "That is, in the face of your own gratifying reports? News from the American field is not only encouraging, but highly stimulating. The statistics which are just at hand from Monsignor, our Delegate in Washington, reveal the truly astonishing growth of our beloved cause for the restoration of all things in Christ. Has not God shown even in our beloved America that our way of worshiping Him is the way He approves?"
"But, Your Eminence, the constant defections! It was only last week that a priest and his entire congregation went over to the Episcopal faith. And--"
"What of that? 'It must needs be that offenses come.' Where one drops out, ten take his place."
"True, while we recruit our depleted ranks from the Old World. But, with restricted immigration--"
"Which is not restricted, as yet," replied the Cardinal-Bishop with a sapient smile. "Nor is there any restriction upon the inspiration, political as well as spiritual, which the American Government draws from Rome--an inspiration much more potent, I think, than our Protestant brethren would care to admit."
"Is that inspiration such, think you, as to draw the American Government more and more into the hands of the Church?"
"Its effect in the past unquestionably has been such," said the Cardinal-Bishop meditatively.
"And shall our dreams of an age be fulfilled--that the Holy Father will throw off the shackles which now hold him a prisoner within the Vatican, and that he will then personally direct the carrying out of those policies of world expansion which shall gather all mankind into the fold of Holy Church?"
"There is a lessening doubt of it," was the tentative reply.
"And--" the Bishop hesitated. "And--shall we say that those all-embracing policies ultimately will be directed by the Holy Father from Washington itself?"
A long pause ensued, during which Josè was all ears.
"Why not?" finally returned the Cardinal-Bishop slowly. "Why not, if it should better suit our purposes? It may become advisable to remove the Holy See from Rome."
"But--impossible!"
"Not at all--quite possible, though I will not say probable. But let us see, can we not say that the time has arrived when no President of the United States can be elected without the Catholic vote? Having our vote, we have his pledges to support our policies. These statistics before us show that already seventy-five per cent of all Government employes in Washington are of our faith. We control Federal, State, County and City offices without number. I think--I think the time is not distant when we shall be able to set up a candidate of our faith for the Presidency, if we care to. And," he mused, "we shall elect him. But, all in good time, all in good time."
"And is that," the Bishop interrogated eagerly, "what the Holy Father is now contemplating?"
"I cannot say that it is," answered the noncommittal Cardinal-Bishop. "But the Holy Father loves America. He rejoices in your report of progress in your diocese. The successes attained by Catholic candidates in the recent elections are most gratifying to him. This not only testifies to the progress of Catholicism in America, but is tangible proof of the growth of tolerance and liberal-mindedness in that great nation. The fact that the Catholic Mass is now being said in the American army affords further proof."
"Yes," meditated the Bishop. "Our candidates who receive election are quite generally loyal to the Church."
"And should constitute a most potent factor in the holy work of making America dominantly Catholic," added the older man.
"True, Your Eminence. And yet, this great desideratum can never come about until the youth are brought into the true fold. And that means, as you well know, the abolishing of the public school system."
"What think you of that?" asked the Cardinal-Bishop off-handedly.
The Bishop waxed suddenly animated. A subject had been broached which lay close to his heart. "The public schools constitute a godless sink of pollution!" he replied heatedly. "They are nurseries of vice! They are part of an immoral and vicious system of education which is undermining the religion of American children! I have always contended that we, the Holy Catholic Church, must control education! I hold that education outside of the Church is heresy of the most damnable kind! We have heretofore weakly protested against this pernicious system, but without success, excepting"--and here he smiled cynically--"that we have very generally succeeded in forcing the discontinuance of Bible reading in the public schools. And in certain towns where our parochial schools do not instruct beyond the eighth grade, it looks as if we might force the introduction of a form of the Catholic Mass to be read each morning in the High School."
"Excellent!" exclaimed the Cardinal-Bishop. "Your voice thrills me like a trumpet call."
"I would it were such," cried the Bishop excitedly, "summoning the faithful to strike a blow which shall be felt! What right have the United States, or any nation, to educate the young? None whatever! Education belongs to the Church! Our rights in this respect have been usurped! But they shall be restored--if need be, at the point of the--"
"You positively make my old heart leap to the fray," interrupted the smiling, white-haired churchman. "But I feel assured that we shall accomplish just that without violence or bloodshed, my son. You echo my sentiments exactly on the pregnant question. And yet, by getting Catholics employed in the public schools as teachers, and by electing our candidates to public offices, we quietly accomplish our ends, do we not?"
"But when will the Holy Father recognize the time as propitious for a more decisive step in that respect?"
"Why, my son, I think you fail to see that we keep continually stepping. We are growing by leaps and bounds in America. At the close of the War of Independence the United States numbered some forty-five thousand adherents to the Catholic faith. Now the number has increased to twelve or fifteen millions. Of these, some four millions are voters. A goodly number, is it not?"
"Then," cried the Bishop, "let the Holy Father boldly make the demand that the States appropriate money for the support of our parochial schools!"
Josè's ears throbbed. Before his ordination he had heard the Liturgy for the conversion of America recited in the chapel of the seminary. And as often he had sought to picture the condition of the New World under the religio-political influence which has for centuries dominated the Old. But he had always dismissed the idea of such domination as wholly improbable, if not quite impossible in America. Yet, since coming into the Papal Secretary's office, his views were slowly undergoing revision. The Church was concentrating on America. Of that there could be no doubt. Indeed, he had come to believe its success as a future world-power to be a function of the stand which it could secure and maintain in the United States. Now, as he strained his ears, he could hear the aged Cardinal-Bishop's low, tense words--
"There can be no real separation of Church and State. The Church is not inferior to the civil power, nor is it in any way dependent upon it. And the Church can never be excluded from educating and training the young, from molding society, from making laws, and governing, temporally and spiritually. From this attitude we shall never depart! Ours is the only true religion. England and Germany have been spiritually dead. But, praise to the blessed Virgin who has heard our prayers and made intercession for us, England, after long centuries of struggle with man-made sects and indefinite dogma, its spiritually-starving people fast drifting into atheism and infidelity because of nothing to hold to, has awakened, and in these first hours of her resurrection is fast returning to the Holy Church of Rome. America, in these latter days, is rousing from the blight of Puritanism, Protestantism, and their inevitable result, free-thinking and anarchy, and is becoming the brightest jewel in the Papal crown."
The Bishop smiled dubiously. "And yet, Your Eminence," he replied, "we are heralded from one end of the land to the other as a menace to Republican institutions."
"Ah, true. And you must agree that Romanism is a distinct menace to the insane license of speech and press. It is a decided menace to the insanity of Protestantism. But," he added archly, while his eyes twinkled, "I have no doubt that when Catholic education has advanced a little further many of your American preachers, editors, and Chautauqua demagogues will find themselves behind the bars of madhouses. Fortunately, that editor of the prominent American magazine of which you were speaking switched from his heretic Episcopal faith in time to avoid this unpleasant consequence."
The Bishop reflected for a moment. Then, deliberately, as if meditating the great import of his words, "Your Eminence, in view of our strength, and our impregnable position as God's chosen, cannot the Holy Father insist that the United States mails be barred against the infamous publications that so basely vilify our Church?"
"And thereby precipitate a revolution?" It was the firm voice of the Papal Secretary himself, who at that moment entered the room.
"But, Monsignor," said the Bishop, as he rose and saluted the newcomer, "how much longer must we submit to the gross injustice and indignities practiced upon us by non-believers?"
"As long as the infallible Holy Father directs," replied that eminent personage. "Obey him, as you would God himself," the Secretary continued. "And teach your flock to do likewise. The ballot will do for us in America what armed resistance never could. Listen, friend, my finger is on the religious pulse of the world. Nowhere does this pulse beat as strongly as in that part which we call the United States. For years I have been watching the various contending forces in that country, diligently and earnestly studying the elements acting and reacting upon our Church there. I have come to the conclusion that the success of Holy Church throughout the world depends upon its advance in the United States during the next few years. I have become an American enthusiast! The glorious work of making America Catholic is so fraught with consequences of vastest import that my blood surges with the enthusiasm of an old Crusader! But there is much still to be done. America is a field white for the harvest, almost unobstructed."
"Then," queried the Bishop, "you do not reckon Protestantism an obstruction?"
"Protestantism!" the Secretary rejoined with a cynical laugh. "No, I reckon it as nothing. Protestantism in America is decadent. It has split, divided, and disintegrated, until it is scarcely recognizable. Its adherents are falling away in great numbers. Its weak tenets and senile faith hold but comparatively few and lukewarm supporters. It has degenerated into a sort of social organization, with musicals, pink teas, and church suppers as attractions. No, America is bound to be classed as a Catholic nation--and I expect to live to see it thus. Our material and spiritual progress in the United States is amazing, showing how nobly American Catholics have responded to the Holy Father's appeal. New dioceses are springing up everywhere. Churches are multiplying with astonishing rapidity. The discouraging outlook in Europe is more, far more, than counterbalanced by our wonderful progress in the United States. We might say that the Vatican now rests upon American backs, for the United States send more Peter's Pence to Rome than all other Catholic countries together. We practically control her polls and her press. America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, a Catholic in the service of a Catholic ruler. It is Catholic in essence, and it shall so be recognized! The Holy Catholic Church always has been and always will be the sole and only Christian authority. The Catholic religion by rights ought to be, and ultimately shall be, the exclusively dominant religion of the world, and every other sort of worship shall be banished--interdicted--destroyed!"
For a while Josè heard no more. His ears burned and his brain throbbed. He had become conscious of but one all-absorbing thought, the fact of his vassalage to a world-embracing political system, working in the name of the Christ. Not a new thought, by any means--indeed an old one, often held--but now driven home to him most emphatically. He forgot his clerical duties and sank into profound revery on his inconsistent position in the office of the highest functionary of Holy Church aside from the Supreme Pontiff himself.
He was aroused at length from his meditations by the departure of the American Bishop. "It is true, as you report," the Papal Secretary was saying earnestly. "America seems rife with modernism. Free-masonry, socialism, and countless other fads and religious superstitions are widely prevalent there. Nor do I underestimate their strength and influence. And yet, I fear them not. There are also certain freak religions, philosophical beliefs, wrung from the simple teachings of our blessed Saviour, the rapid spread of which at one time did give me some concern. The Holy Father mentioned one or two of them to-day, in reference to his contemplated encyclical on modernism. But I now see that they are cults based upon human personality; and with their leaders removed, the fabrics will of themselves crumble."
He took leave of the Bishop, and turned again to address the Cardinal-Bishop within. "A matter of the gravest import has arisen," he began in a low voice; "and one that may directly affect our negotiations in regard to the support which the Holy Father will need in case he issues a pronunciamento that France, Spain, and Austria shall no longer exercise the right of veto in papal elections. That rumor regarding Isabella's daughter is again afloat. I have summoned Father Rafaél de Rincón to Rome to state what he knows. But--" He rose and looked out through the door at Josè, bending over his littered desk. Then he went back, and resumed his conversation with the Cardinal-Bishop, but in a tone so low that Josè could catch only disconnected scraps.
"What, Colombia?" he at length heard the Cardinal-Bishop exclaim.
"Yes," was the Secretary's reply. "And presumably at the instigation of that busybody, Wenceslas Ortiz. Though what concern he might have in the Infanta is to me incomprehensible--assuming, of course, that there is such a royal daughter."
"But--Colombia elects a President soon, is it not so?"
"On the eve of election now," replied the Secretary. "And if the influence of Wenceslas with the Bishop of Cartagena is what I am almost forced to admit that it is, then the election is in his hands. But, the Infanta--" The sound of his voice did not carry the rest of his words to Josè's itching ears.
An hour later the Secretary and the Cardinal-Bishop came out of the room and left the office together. "Yes," the Secretary was saying, "in the case of Wenceslas it was 'pull and percuniam' that secured him his place. The Church did not put him there."
The Cardinal-Bishop laughed genially. "Then the Holy Ghost was not consulted, I take it," he said.
"No," replied the Secretary grimly. "And he has so complicated the already delicate situation in Colombia that I fear Congress will table the bill prohibiting Free-masonry. It is to be deplored. Among all the Latin Republics none has been more thoroughly Catholic than Colombia."
"Is the Holy Father's unpublished order regarding the sale and distribution of Bibles loyally observed there?" queried the Cardinal-Bishop.
The door closed upon them and Josè heard no more. His day's duties ended, he went to his room to write and reflect. But the intense afternoon heat again drove him forth to seek what comfort he might near the river. With his notebook in hand he went to the little park, as was his frequent wont. An hour or so later, while he was jotting down his remembrance of the conversation just overheard, together with his own caustic and protesting opinions, his absorption was broken by the strange child's accident. A few minutes later the notebook had disappeared.
And now the thought of all this medley of personal material and secret matters of Church polity falling into the hands of those who might make capital of it, and thereby drag the Rincón honor through the mire, cast the man prostrate in the dust.
Chapter 10
Days passed--days whose every dawn found the priest staring in sleepless, wide-eyed terror at the ceiling above--days crowded with torturing apprehension and sickening suggestion--days when his knees quaked and his hands shook when his superiors addressed him in the performance of his customary duties. No mental picture was too frightful or abhorrent for him to entertain as portraying a possible consequence of the loss of his journal. He cowered in agony before these visions. He dared not seek the little park again. He feared to show himself in the streets. He dreaded the short walk from his dormitory to the Vatican. His life became a sustained torture--a consuming agony of uncertainty, interminable suspense, fearful foreboding. The cruelty of his position corroded him. His health suffered, and his cassock hung like a bag about his emaciated form.
Then the filament snapped and the sword fell. On a dismal, rainy morning, some two months after the incident in the park, Josè was summoned into the private office of the Papal Secretary of State. As the priest entered the small room the Secretary, sitting alone at his desk, turned and looked at him long and fixedly.
"So, my son," he said in a voice that froze the priest's blood, "you are still alive?" Then, taking up a paper-covered book of medium size which apparently he had been reading, he held it out without comment.
Josè took it mechanically. The book was crudely printed and showed evidence of having been hastily issued. It came from the press of a Viennese publisher, and bore the startling title, "Confessions of a Roman Catholic Priest." As in a dream Josè opened it. A cry escaped him, and the book fell from his hands. It was his journal!
There are sometimes crises in human lives when the storm-spent mind, tossing on the waves of heaving emotion, tugs and strains at the ties which moor it to reason, until they snap, and it sweeps out into the unknown, where blackness and terror rage above the fathomless deep. Such a crisis had entered the life of the unhappy priest, who now held in his shaking hand the garbled publication of his life's most sacred thoughts. Into whose hands his notes had fallen on that black day when he had sacrificed everything for an unknown child, he knew not. How they had made their way into Austria, and into the pressroom of the heretical modernist who had gleefully issued them, twisted, exaggerated, but unabridged, he might not even imagine. The terrible fact remained that there in his hands they stared up at him in hideous mockery, his soul-convictions, his heart's deepest and most inviolable thoughts, details of his own personal history, secrets of state--all ruthlessly exposed to the world's vulgar curiosity and the rapacity of those who would not fail to play them up to the certain advantages to which they lent themselves all too well.
And there before him, too, were the Secretary's sharp eyes, burning into his very soul. He essayed to speak, to rise to his own defense. But his throat filled, and the words which he would utter died on his trembling lips. The room whirled about him. Floods of memory began to sweep over him in huge billows. The conflicting forces which had culminated in placing him in the paradoxical position in which he now stood raced before him in confused review. Objects lost their definite outlines and melted into the haze which rose before his straining eyes. All things at last merged into the terrible presence of the Papal Secretary, as he slowly rose, tall and gaunt, and with arm extended and long, bony finger pointing to the yellow river in the distance, said in words whose cruel suggestion scorched the raw soul of the suffering priest:
"My son, be advised: the Tiber covers many sins."
Then pitying oblivion opened wide her arms, and the tired priest sank gently into them.
Chapter 11
Rome again lay scorching beneath a merciless summer sun. But the energetic uncle of Josè was not thereby restrained from making another hurried visit to the Vatican. What his mission was does not appear in papal records; but, like the one which he found occasion to make just prior to the ordination of his nephew, this visit was not extended to include Josè, who throughout that enervating summer lay tossing in delirium in the great hospital of the Santo Spirito. We may be sure, however, that its influence upon the disposition of the priest's case after the recent dénoûement was not inconsiderable, and that it was largely responsible for his presence before the Holy Father himself when, after weeks of racking fever, wan and emaciated, and leaning upon the arm of the confidential valet of His Holiness, the young priest faced that august personage and heard the infallible judgment of the Holy See upon his unfortunate conduct.
On the throne of St. Peter, in the heavily tapestried private audience room of the great Vatican prison-palace, and guarded from intrusion by armed soldiery and hosts of watchful ecclesiastics of all grades, sat the Infallible Council, the Vicar-General of the humble Nazarene, the aged leader at whose beck a hundred million faithful followers bent in lowly genuflection. Near him stood the Papal Secretary of State and two Cardinal-Bishops of the Administrative Congregation.
Josè dragged himself wearily before the Supreme Pontiff and bent low.
"Benedicite, my erring son." The soft voice of His Holiness floated not unmusically through the tense silence of the room.
"Arise. The hand of the Lord already has been laid heavily upon you in wholesome chastening for your part in this deplorable affair. And the same omnipotent hand has been stretched forth to prevent the baneful effects of your thoughtless conduct. We do not condemn you, my son. It was the work of the Evil One, who has ever found through your weaknesses easy access to your soul."
Josè raised his blurred eyes and gazed at the Holy Father in perplexed astonishment. But the genial countenance of the patriarch seemed to confirm his mild words. A smile, tender and patronizing, in which Josè read forgiveness--and yet with it a certain undefined something which augured conditions upon which alone penalty for his culpability would be remitted--lighted up the pale features of the Holy Father and warmed the frozen life-currents of the shrinking priest.
"My son," the Pontiff continued tenderly, "our love for our wandering children is but stimulated by their need of our protecting care. Fear not; the guilty publisher of your notes has been awakened to his fault, and the book which he so thoughtlessly issued has been quite suppressed."
Josè bent his head and patiently awaited the conclusion.
"You have lain for weeks at death's door, my son. The words which you uttered in your delirium corroborated our own thought of your innocence of intentional wrong. And now that you have regained your reason, you will confess to us that your reports, and especially your account of the recent conversation between the Cardinal-Secretary of State and the Cardinal-Bishop, were written under that depression of mind which has long afflicted you, producing a form of mental derangement, and giving rise to frequent hallucination. It is this which has caused us to extend to you our sympathy and protection. Long and intense study, family sorrow, and certain inherited traits of disposition, whose rapid development have tended to lack of normal mental balance, account to us for those deeds of eccentricity on your part which have plunged us into extreme embarrassment and yourself into the illness which threatened your young life. Is it not so, my son?"
The priest stared up at the speaker in bewilderment. This unexpected turn of affairs had swept his defense from his mind.
"The Holy Father awaits your reply," the Papal Secretary spoke with severity. His own thought had been greatly ruffled that morning, and his patience severely taxed by a threatened mutiny among the Swiss guards, whose demands in regard to the quantity of wine allowed them and whose memorial recounting other alleged grievances he had just flatly rejected. The muffled cries of "Viva Garibaldi!" as the petitioners left his presence were still echoing in the Secretary's ears, and his anger had scarce begun to cool.
"We are patient, my Cardinal-Nephew," the Pontiff resumed mildly. "Our love for this erring son enfolds him." Then, turning again to Josè, "We have correctly summarized the causes of your recent conduct, have we not?"
The priest made as if to reply, but hesitated, with the words fluttering on his lips.
"My dear son"--the Holy Father bent toward the wondering priest in an attitude of loving solicitation--"our blessed Saviour was ofttimes confronted with those possessed of demons. Did he reject them? No; and, despite the accusations against us in your writings, for which we know you were not morally responsible, we, Christ's representative on earth, are still touched with his love and pity for one so unfortunate as you. With your help we shall stop the mouths of calumny, and set you right before the world. We shall use our great resources to save the Rincón honor which, through the working of Satan within you, is now unjustly besmirched. We shall labor to restore you to your right mind, and to the usefulness which your scholarly gifts make possible to you. We indeed rejoice that your piteous appeal has reached our ears. We rejoice to correct those erroneous views which you, in the temporary aberration of reason, were driven to commit to writing, and which so unfortunately fell into the hands of Satan's alert emissaries. Your ravings during these weeks of delirium shed much light upon the obsessing thoughts which plunged you into mild insanity. And they have stirred the immeasurable depths of pity within us."
The Holy Father paused after this unwontedly long speech. A dumb sense of stupefaction seemed to possess the priest, and he passed his shrunken hands before his eyes as if he would brush away a mist.
"That this unfortunate book is but the uttering of delirium, we have already announced to the world," His Holiness gently continued. "But out of our deep love for a family which has supplied so many illustrious sons to our beloved Church we have suppressed mention of your name in connection therewith."
The priest started, as he vaguely sensed the impending issue. What was it that His Holiness was about to demand? That he denounce his journal, over his own signature, as the ravings of a man temporarily insane? He was well aware that the Vatican's mere denial of the allegations therein contained, and its attributing of them to a mad priest, would scarcely carry conviction to the Courts of Spain and Austria, or to an astonished world. But, for him to declare them the garbled and unauthentic utterances of an aberrant mind, and to make public such statement in his own name, would save the situation, possibly the Rincón honor, even though it stultify his own.
His Holiness waited a few moments for the priest's reply; but receiving none, he continued with deep significance:
"You will not make it necessary, we know, for us to announce that a mad priest, a son of the house of Rincón, now confined in an asylum, voiced these heretical and treasonable utterances."
The voice of His Holiness flowed like cadences of softest music, charming in its tenderness, winning in its appeal, but momentous in its certain implication.
"In our solicitude for your recovery we commanded our own physicians to attend you. To them you owe your life. To them, too, we owe our gratitude for that report on your case which reveals the true nature of the malady afflicting you."
The low voice vibrated in rhythmic waves through the dead silence of the room.
"To them also you now owe this opportunity to abjure the writings which have caused us and yourself such great sorrow; to them you owe this privilege of confessing before us, who will receive your recantation, remit your unintentional sins, and restore you to honor and service in our beloved Church."
Josè suddenly came to himself. Recant! Confess! In God's name, what? Abjure his writings, the convictions of a lifetime!
"These writings, my son, are not your sane and rational convictions," the Pontiff suggested.
Josè still stood mute before him.
"You renounce them now, in the clear light of restored reason; and you swear future lealty to us and to Holy Church," the aged Father continued.
"Make answer!" commanded one of the Cardinal-Bishops, starting toward the wavering priest. "Down on your knees before the Holy Father, who waits to forgive your venial sin!"
Josè turned swiftly to the approaching Cardinal and held up a hand. The man stopped short. The Pontiff and his associates bent forward in eager anticipation. The valet fell back, and Josè stood alone. In that tense mental atmosphere the shrinking priest seemed to be transformed into a Daniel.
"No, Holy Father, you mistake!" His voice rang through the room like a clarion. "I do not recant! My writings do express my deepest and sanest convictions!"
The Pontiff's pallid face went dark. The eyes of the other auditors bulged with astonishment. A dumb spell settled over the room.
"Father, my guilt lies not in having recorded my honest convictions, nor in the fact that these records fell into the hands of those who eagerly grasp every opportunity to attack their common enemy, the Church. It lies rather in my weak resistance to those influences which in early life combined to force upon me a career to which I was by temperament and instinct utterly disinclined. It lies in my having sacrificed myself to the selfish love of my mother and my own exaggerated sense of family pride. It lies in my still remaining outwardly a priest of the Catholic faith, when every fiber of my soul revolts against the hypocrisy!"
"You are a subject of the Church!" the Papal Secretary interrupted. "You have sworn to her and to the Sovereign Pontiff as loyal and unquestioning obedience as to the will of God himself!"
Josè turned upon him. "Before my ordination," he cried, "I was a voluntary subject of the Sovereign of Spain. Did that ceremony render me an unwilling subject of the Holy Father? Does the ceremony of ordination constitute the Romanizing of Spain? No, I am not a subject of Rome, but of my conscience!"
Another dead pause followed, in which for some moments nothing disturbed the oppressive silence. Josè looked eagerly into the delicate features of the living Head of the Church. Then, with decreased ardor, and in a voice tinged with pathos, he continued:
"Father, my mistakes have been only such as are natural to one of my peculiar character. I came to know, but too late, that my life-motives, though pure, found not in me the will for their direction. I became a tool in the hands of those stronger than myself. For what ultimate purpose, I know not. Of this only am I certain, that my mother's ambitions, though selfish, were the only pure motives among those which united to force the order of priesthood upon me."
"Force!" burst in one of the Cardinal-Bishops. "Do you assume to make the Holy Father believe that the priesthood can be forced upon a man? You assumed it willingly, gladly, as was your proper return for the benefits which the Mother Church had bestowed upon you!"
"In a state of utmost confusion, bordering a mental breakdown, I assumed it--outwardly," returned the priest sadly, "but my heart never ceased to reject it. Once ordained, however, I sought in my feeble way to study the needs of the Church, and prepare myself to assist in the inauguration of reforms which I felt she must some day undertake."
The Pontiff's features twitched with ill-concealed irritation at this confession; but before he could speak Josè continued:
"Oh, Father, and Cardinal-Princes of the Church, does not the need of your people for truth wring your hearts? Turn from your zealous dreams of world-conquest and see them, steeped in ignorance and superstition, wretched with poverty, war, and crime, extending their hands to you as their spiritual leaders--to you, Holy Father, who should be their Moses, to smite the rock of error, that the living, saving truth may gush out!"
He paused, as if fearful of his own rushing thought. Then: "Is not the past fraught with lessons of deepest import to us? Is not the Church being rejected by the nations of Europe because of our intolerance, our oppression, our stubborn clinging to broken idols and effete forms of faith? We are now turning from the wreckage which the Church has wrought in the Old World, and our eyes are upon America. But can we deceive ourselves that free, liberty-loving America will bow her neck to the mediaeval yoke which the Church would impose upon her? Why, oh, why cannot we see the Church's tremendous opportunities for good in this century, and yield to that inevitable mental and moral progression which must sweep her from her foundations, unless she conform to its requirements and join in the movement toward universal emancipation! Our people are taught from childhood to be led; they are willing followers--none more willing in the world! But why lead them into the pit? Why muzzle them with fear, oppress them with threats, fetter them with outworn dogma and dead creed? Why continue to dazzle them with pagan ceremonialism and oriental glamour, and then, our exactions wrung from them, leave them to consume with disease and decay with moral contagion?"
"The man is mad with heresy!" muttered the Pontiff, turning to the Cardinal-Bishops.
"No, it is not I who is mad with heresy, but the Holy Church, of which you are the spiritual Head!" cried the priest, his loud voice trembling with indignation and his frail body swaying under his rapidly growing excitement. "She is guilty of the damnable heresy of concealing knowledge, of hiding truth, of stifling honest questionings! She is guilty of grossest intolerance, of deadliest hatred, of impurest motives--she, the self-constituted, self-endowed spiritual guide of mankind, arrogating to herself infallibility, superiority, supreme authority--yea, the very voice of God himself!"
The priest had now lost all sense of environment, and his voice waxed louder as he continued:
"The conduct of the Church throughout the centuries has made her the laughing-stock of history, an object of ridicule to every man of education and sense! She is filled with superstition--do you not know it? She is permeated with pagan idolatry, fetishism, and carnal-mindedness! She is pitiably ignorant of the real teachings of the Christ! Her dogmas have been formed by the subtle wits of Church theologians. They are in this century as childish as her political and social schemes are mischievous! Why have we formulated our doctrine of purgatory? Why so solicitous about souls in purgatorial torment, and yet so careless of them while still on earth? Where is our justification for the doctrine of infallibility? Is liberty to think the concession of God, or of the Holy Father? Where, oh, where is the divine Christ in our system of theology? Is he to be found in materialism, intolerance, the burning of Bibles, in hatred of so-called heretics, and in worldly practices? Are we not keeping the Christ in the sepulcher, refusing to permit him to arise?"
His speech soared into the impassioned energy of thundered denunciation.
"Yes, Holy Father, and Cardinal-Bishops, I am justified in criticizing the Holy Catholic Church! And I am likewise justified in condemning the Protestant Church! All have fallen woefully short of the glory of God, and none obeys the simple commands of the Christ. The Church throughout the world has become secularized, and worship is but hollow consistency in the strict performance of outward acts of devotion. Our religion is but a hypocritical show of conformity. Our asylums, our hospitals, our institutions of charity? Alas! they but evidence our woeful shortcoming, and our persistent refusal to rise into the strength of the healing, saving Christ, which would render these obsolete institutions unnecessary in the world of to-day! The Holy Catholic Church is but a human institution. Its worldliness, its scheming, its political machinations, make me shudder--!"
"Stop, madman!" thundered one of the Cardinal-Bishops, rushing upon the frail Josè with such force as to fell him to the floor. The Pontiff had risen, and sunk again into his chair. The valet hurried to his assistance. The Papal Secretary, his face contorted with rage, and his throat choking with the press of words which he strove to utter, hastened to the door to summon help. "Remove this man!" he commanded, pointing out the prostrate form of Josè to the two Swiss guards who had responded to his call. "Confine him! He is violent--a raging maniac!"
A few days later, Padre Josè de Rincón, having been pronounced by the Vatican physicians mentally deranged, as the result of acute cerebral anaemia, was quietly conveyed to a sequestered monastery at Palazzola.
* * * * *
Two summers came, and fled again before the chill winds which blew from the Alban hills. Then one day Josè's uncle appeared at the monastery door with a written order from His Holiness, effecting the priest's conditional release. Together they journeyed at once to Seville, the uncle alert and energetic as ever, showing but slight trace of time's devastating hand; Josè, the shadow of his former self physically, and his mind clouded with the somber pall of melancholia.
Toward the close of a quiet summer, spent with his mother in his boyhood home, Josè received from his uncle's hand another letter, bearing the papal insignia. It was evident that it was not unexpected, for it found the priest with his effects packed and ready for a considerable journey. A hurried farewell to his mother, and the life-weary Josè, combining innocence and misery in exaggerated proportions, and still a vassal of Rome, set out for the port of Cadiz. There, in company with the Apostolic Delegate and Envoy Extraordinary to the Republic of Colombia, he embarked on the West Indian trader Sarnia, bound for Cartagena, in the New World.
Chapter 12
There is no region in the Western Hemisphere more invested with the spirit of romance and adventure than that strip of Caribbean coast stretching from the Cape of Yucatan to the delta of the Orinoco and known as the Spanish Main. No more superb setting could have been chosen for the opening scenes of the New World drama. Skies of profoundest blue--the tropical sun flaming through massive clouds of vapor--a sea of exuberant color, foaming white over coral beaches--waving cocoa palms against a background of exotic verdure marking a tortuous shore line, which now rises sheer and precipitous from the water's edge to dizzy, snowcapped, cloud-hung heights, now stretches away into vast reaches of oozy mangrove bog and dank cinchona grove--here flecked with stagnant lagoons that teem with slimy, crawling life--there flattened into interminable, forest-covered plains and untrodden, primeval wildernesses, impenetrable, defiant, alluring--and all perennially bathed in dazzling light, vivid color, and soft, fragrant winds--with everywhere redundant foliage--humming, chattering, screaming life--profusion--extravagance--prodigality--riotous waste! Small wonder that when this enticing shore was first revealed to the astonished Conquistadores, where every form of Nature was wholly different from anything their past experience afforded, they were childishly receptive to every tale, however preposterous, of fountains of youth, of magical lakes, or enchanted cities with mountains of gold in the depths of the frowning jungle. They had come with their thought attuned to enchantment; their minds were fallow to the incredible; they were fresh from their conquest of the vast Mare Tenebrosum, with its mysteries and terrors. At a single stroke from the arm of the intrepid Genoese the mediaeval superstitions which peopled the unknown seas had fallen like fetters from these daring and adventurous souls. The slumbering spirit of knight-errantry awoke suddenly within their breasts; and when from their frail galleons they beheld with ravished eyes this land of magic and alluring mystery which spread out before them in such gorgeous panorama, they plunged into the glittering waters with waving swords and pennants, with shouts of praise and joy upon their lips, and inaugurated that series of prodigious enterprise, extravagant deeds of hardihood, and tremendous feats of prowess which still remain unsurpassed in the annals of history for brilliancy, picturesqueness, and wealth of incident.
With almost incredible rapidity and thoroughness the Spanish arms spread over the New World, urged by the corroding lust of gold and the sharp stimulus afforded by the mythical quests which animated the simple minds of these hardy searchers for the Golden Fleece. Neither trackless forests, withering heat, miasmatic climate nor savage Indians could dampen their ardor or check their search for riches and glory. They penetrated everywhere, steel-clad and glittering, with lance and helmet and streaming banner. Every nook, every promontory of a thousand miles of coast was minutely searched; every island was bounded; every towering mountain scaled. Even those vast regions of New Granada which to-day are as unknown as the least explored parts of darkest Africa became the scenes of stirring adventure and brilliant exploit of these daring crusaders of more than three centuries ago.
The real wonders yielded by this newly discovered land of enchantment far exceeded the fabled Manoa or El Dorado of mythical lore; and the adventurous expeditions that were first incited by these chimeras soon changed into practical colonizing and developing projects of real and permanent value. Amazing discoveries were made of empires which had already developed a state of civilization, mechanical, military, and agricultural, which rivaled those of Europe. Natural resources were revealed such as the Old World had not even guessed were possible. Great rivers, vast fertile plains, huge veins of gold and copper ore, inexhaustible timber, a wealth of every material thing desired by man, could be had almost without effort. Fortunate, indeed, was the Spanish Conquistador in the possession of such immeasurable riches; fortunate, indeed, had he possessed the wisdom to meet the supreme test of character which this sudden accession of wealth and power was to bring!
With the opening of the vast treasure house flanked by the Spanish Main came the Spaniard's supreme opportunity to master the world. Soon in undisputed possession of the greater part of the Western Hemisphere; with immeasurable wealth flowing into his coffers; sustained by dauntless courage and an intrepid spirit of adventure; with papal support, and the learning and genius of the centuries at his command, he faced the opportunity to extend his sway over the entire world and unite all peoples into a universal empire, both temporal and spiritual. That he failed to rise to this possibility was not due to any lack of appreciation of his tremendous opportunity, nor to a dearth of leaders of real military genius, but to a misapprehension of the great truth that the conquest of the world is not to be wrought by feats of arms, but by the exercise of those moral attributes and spiritual qualities of heart and soul which he did not possess--or possessing, had prostituted to the carnal influences of lust of material riches and temporal power.
In the immediate wake of the Spanish Conqueros surged the drift and flotsam of the Old World. Cities soon sprang up along the Spanish Main which reflected a curious blend of the old-time life of Seville and Madrid with the picturesque and turbulent elements of the adventurer and buccaneer. The spirit of the West has always been synonymous with a larger sense of freedom, a shaking off of prejudice and tradition and the trammels of convention. The sixteenth century towns of the New World were no exception, and their streets and plazas early exhibited a multicolored panorama, wherein freely mingled knight and predaceous priest, swashbuckler and staid hidalgo, timid Indian and veiled doncella--a potpourri of merchant, prelate, negro, thief, the broken in fortune and the blackened in character--all poured into the melting pot of the new West, and there steaming and straining, scheming and plotting, attuned to any pitch of venturesome project, so be it that gold and fame were the promised emoluments thereof.
And gold, and fame of a certain kind, were always to be had by those whose ethical code permitted of a little straining. For the great ships which carried the vast wealth of this new land of magic back to the perennially empty coffers of Old Spain constituted a temptation far more readily recognized than resisted. These huge, slow-moving galleons, gilded and carved, crawling lazily over the surface of the bright tropical sea, and often so heavily freighted with treasure as to be unsafe in rough weather, came to be regarded as special dispensations of Providence by the cattle thieves and driers of beef who dwelt in the pirates' paradise of Tortuga and Hispaniola, and little was required in way of soul-alchemy to transform the boucanier into the lawless and sanguinary, though picturesque, corsair of that romantic age. The buccaneer was but a natural evolution from the peculiar conditions then obtaining. Where human society in the process of formation has not yet arrived at the necessity of law to restrain the lust and greed of its members; and where at the same time untold wealth is to be had at the slight cost of a few lives; and, too, where even the children are taught that whosoever aids in the destruction of Spanish ships and Spanish lives renders a service to the Almighty, the buccaneer must be regarded as the logical result. He multiplied with astonishing rapidity in these warm, southern waters, and not a ship that sailed the Caribbean was safe from his sudden depredations. So extensive and thorough was his work that the bed of the Spanish Main is dotted with traditional treasure ships, and to this day remnants of doubloons or "pieces of eight" and bits of bullion and jewelry are washed up on the shining beaches of Panamá and northern Colombia as grim memorials of his lawless activities.
The expenditure of energy necessary to transport the gold, silver and precious stones from the New World to the bottomless treasury of Spain was stupendous. Yet not less stupendous was the amount of treasure transported. From the distant mines of Potosi, from the Pilcomayo, from the almost inaccessible fastnesses of what are now Bolivia and Ecuador, a precious stream poured into the leaking treasure box of Spain that totalled a value of no less than ten billion dollars. Much of the wealth which came from Peru was shipped up to the isthmus of Panamá, and thence transferred to plate-fleets. But the buccaneers became so active along the Pacific coast that water shipment was finally abandoned, and from that time transportation had to be made overland by way of the Andean plateau, sometimes a distance of two thousand miles, to the strongholds which were built to receive and protect the treasure until the plate-fleets could be made up. Of these strongholds there were two of the first importance, the old city of Panamá, on the isthmus, and the almost equally old city of Cartagena, on the northern coast of what is now the Republic of Colombia.
The spirit of ancient Carthage must have breathed upon this "Very Royal and Loyal City" which Pedro de Heredia in the sixteenth century founded on the north coast of New Granada, and bequeathed to it a portion of its own romance and tragedy. Superbly placed upon a narrow, tongue-shaped islet, one of a group that shield an ample harbor from the sharp tropical storms which burst unheralded over the sea without; girdled by huge, battlemented walls, and guarded by frowning fortresses, Cartagena commanded the gateway to the exhaustless wealth of the Cordilleras, at whose feet she still nestles, bathed in perpetual sunshine, and kissed by cool ocean breezes which temper the winds blowing hot from the steaming llanos of the interior. By the middle of the sixteenth century she offered all that the adventurous seeker of fame and fortune could desire, and attracted to herself not only the chivalry, but the beauty, wealth and learning which, mingled with rougher elements, poured into the New World so freely in the opening scenes of the great drama inaugurated by the arrival of the tiny caravels of Columbus a half century before.
The city waxed quickly rich and powerful. Its natural advantages of location, together with its massive fortifications, and its wonderful harbor, so extensive that the combined fleets of Spain might readily have found anchorage therein, early rendered it the choice of the Spanish monarch as his most dependable reservoir and shipping point for the accumulated treasure of his new possessions. The island upon which the city arose was singularly well chosen for defense. Fortified bridges were built to connect it with the mainland, and subterranean passageways led from the great walls encircling it to the impregnable fortress of San Felipe de Barajas, on Mount San Lázaro, a few hundred yards back of the city and commanding the avenues and approaches of the land side. To the east, and about a mile from the walls, the abrupt hill of La Popa rises, surmounted by the convent of Santa Candelaria, likewise connected by underground tunnels to the interior of the city, and commanding the harbor and its approaches from the sea. The harbor formerly connected with the open sea through two entrances, the Boca Grande, a wide, fortified pass between the island of Tierra Bomba and the tongue on which the city stands, and the Boca Chica, some nine miles farther west, a narrow, tortuous pass, wide enough to permit entry to but a single vessel at a time, and commanded by forts San Fernando and San Josè.
By the middle of the seventeenth century Cartagena, "Queen of the Indies and Queen of the Seas," had expanded into a proud and beautiful city, the most important mart of the New World. Under royal patronage its merchants enjoyed a monopoly of commerce with Spain. Under the special favor of Rome it became an episcopal See, and the seat of the Holy Inquisition. Its docks and warehouses, its great centers of commerce, its sumptuous dwellings, its magnificent Cathedral, its colleges and monasteries, and its proud aristocracy, all reflected the spirit of enterprise which animated its sons and found expression in a city which could boast a pride, a culture, and a wealth almost unrivalled even in the Old World.
But, not unlike her ancient prototype, Cartagena succumbed to the very influences which had made her great. Her wealth excited the cupidity of freebooters, and her power aroused the jealousy of her formidable rivals. Her religion itself became an excuse for the plundering hands of Spain's enemies. Again and again the city was called upon to defend the challenge which her riches and massive walls perpetually issued. Again and again she was forced to yield to the heavy tributes and disgraceful penalties of buccaneers and legalized pirates who, like Drake, came to plunder her under royal patent. Cartagena rose and fell, and rose again. But the human heart which throbs beneath the lash of lust or revenge knows no barriers. Her great forts availed nothing against the lawless hordes which swarmed over them. Neither were her tremendous walls proof against starvation. Again and again, her streets filled with her gaunt dead, she stubbornly held her gates against the enemies of Spain who assaulted her in the name of religion, only at last to weaken with terror and throw them open in disgraceful welcome to the French de Pontis and his maudlin, rag-tag followers, who drained her of her last drop of life blood. As her gates swung wide and this nondescript band of marauders streamed in with curses and shouts of exultation, the glory of this royal mediaeval city passed out forever.
Almost from its inception, Cartagena had been the point of attack of every enterprise launched with the object of wresting from Spain her rich western possessions, so much coveted by her jealous and revengeful rivals. It was Spain herself who fought for very existence while Cartagena was holding her gates against the enemies of Holy Church. And these enemies knew that they had pierced the Spanish heart when the "Queen of the Indies" fell. And in no small measure did Spain deserve the fate which overtook her. For, had it not been for the stupendous amount of treasure derived from these new possessions, the dramatic and dominant part which she played in the affairs of Europe during the sixteenth century would have been impossible. This treasure she wrested from her South American colonies at a cost in the destruction of human life, in the outraging of human instincts, in the debauching of ideals and the falsifying of hope, in hellish oppression and ghastly torture, that can never be adequately estimated. Her benevolent instruments of colonization were cannon and saintly relics. Her agents were swaggering soldiers and bigoted friars. Her system involved the impression of her language and her undemonstrable religious beliefs upon the harmless aborigines. The fruits of this system, which still linger after three centuries, are superstition, black ignorance, and woeful mental retardation. To the terrified aborigines the boasted Spanish civilization meant little more than "gold, liquor, and sadness." Small wonder that the simple Indians, unable to comprehend the Christian's lust for gold, poured the molten metal down the throats of their captives, crying, "Eat, Christian, eat!" They had borrowed their ideals from the Christian Spaniards, who by means of the stake and rack were convincing them that God was not in this western land until they came, bringing their debauched concept of Christianity.
And so Cartagena fell, late in the seventeenth century, never to regain more than a shadow of her former grandeur and prestige. But again she rose, in a semblance of her martial spirit, when her native sons, gathering fresh courage and inspiration from the waning powers of the mother-country in the early years of the century just closed, organized that federation which, after long years of almost hopeless struggle, lifted the yoke of Spanish misrule from New Granada and proclaimed the Republic of Colombia. Cartagena was the first city of Colombia to declare its independence from Spain. And in the great war which followed the "Heroic City" passed through terrible vicissitudes, emerging from it still further depleted and sunken, a shell of massive walls and battered defenses, with desolated homes and empty streets echoing the tread of the mendicant peon.
As the nineteenth century, so rich in invention, discovery, and stirring activity in the great States to the north, drew to a close, a chance visitor to this battle-scarred, mediaeval city would have found her asleep amid the dreams of her former greatness. Approaching from the harbor, especially if he arrived in the early hours of morning, his eyes would have met a view of exquisite beauty. Seen thus, great moss-grown structures rise from within the lofty encircling walls, with many a tower and gilded dome glittering in the clear sunlight and standing out in sharp relief against the green background of forest-plumed hills and towering mountains. The abysmal blue of the untainted tropical sky overhead contrasts sharply with the red-tiled roofs and dazzling white exteriors of the buildings beneath; and the vivid tints, mingling with the iridescence of the scarcely rippling waters of the harbor, blend into a color scheme of rarest loveliness in the clear atmosphere which seems to magnify all distant objects and intensify every hue.
A closer approach to the citadel which lies within the landlocked harbor reveals in detail the features of the stupendous walls which guard this key to Spain's former treasure house. Their immensity and their marvelous construction bear witness to the genius of her famous military engineers, and evoke the same admiration as do the great temples and monuments of ancient Egypt. These grim walls, in places sixty feet through, and pierced by numerous gates, are frequently widened into broad esplanades, and set here and there with bastions and watch towers to command strategic points. At the north end of the city they expand into an elaborately fortified citadel, within which are enormous fresh water tanks, formerly supplied by the rains, and made necessary by the absence of springs so near the coast. Within the walls at various points one finds the now abandoned barracks, storerooms, and echoing dungeons, the latter in the days of the stirring past too often pressed into service by the Holy Inquisition. Underground tunnels, still intact, lead from the walls to the Cathedral, the crumbling fortress of San Felipe de Barajas, and the deserted convent on the summit of La Popa. Time-defying, grim, dramatic reliques of an age forever past, breathing poetry and romance from every crevice--still in fancy echoing from moldering tower and scarred bulwark the clank of sabre, the tread of armored steed, and the shouts of exulting Conquistadores--aye, their ghostly echoes sinking in the fragrant air of night into soft whispers, which bear to the tropical moon dark hints of ancient tragedies enacted within these dim keeps and gloom-shrouded tunnels!
The pass of Boca Grande--"large mouth"--through which Drake's band of marauders sailed triumphantly in the latter part of the sixteenth century, was formerly the usual entrance to the city's magnificent harbor. But its wide, deep channel, only two miles from the city walls, afforded too easy access to undesirable visitors in the heyday of freebooters; and the harassed Cartagenians, wearied of the innumerable piratical attacks which this broad entrance constantly invited, undertook to fill it up. This they accomplished after years of heroic effort and an enormous expenditure of money, leaving the harbor only the slender, tortuous entrance of Boca Chica--"little mouth"--dangerous to incoming vessels because of the almost torrential flow of the tide through it, but much more readily defended. The two castles of San Fernando and San Josè, frowning structures of stone dominating this entrance, have long since fallen into disuse, but are still admirably preserved. Beneath the former, and extending far below the surface of the water, is the old Bastile of the Inquisition, occasionally pressed into requisition now to house recalcitrant politicians, and where no great effort of the imagination is required still to hear the groans of the tortured and the sighs of the condemned, awaiting in chains and san benitos the approaching auto da fé.
But the greater distance from the present entrance of the harbor to the city walls affords the visitor a longer period in which to enjoy the charming panorama which seems to drift slowly out to meet him as he stands entranced before it. The spell of romance and chivalry is upon him long ere he disembarks; and once through the great gateway of the citadel itself, he yields easily to the ineluctable charm which seems to hover in the balmy air of this once proud city. Everywhere are evidences of ancient grandeur, mingling with memories of enormous wealth and violent scenes of strife. The narrow, winding streets, characteristic of oriental cities; the Moorish architecture displayed in the grandiose palaces and churches; the grated, unglazed windows, through which still peep timid señoritas, as in the romantic days of yore; the gaily painted balconies, over which bepowdered doncellas lean to pass the day's gossip in the liquid tongue of Cervantes, all transport one in thought to the chivalrous past, when this picturesque survival of Spain's power in America was indeed the very Queen of the western world and the proud boast of the haughty monarchs of Castile.
Nor was the city more dear to the Spanish King than to the spiritual Sovereign who sat on Peter's throne. The Holy See strove to make Cartagena the chief ecclesiastical center of the New World; and churches, monasteries, colleges, and convents flourished there as luxuriantly as the tropical vegetation. The city was early elevated to a bishopric. A magnificent Cathedral was soon erected, followed by other churches and buildings to house ecclesiastical orders, including the Jesuit college, the University, the women's seminary, and the homes for religious orders of both sexes. The same lavish expenditure of labor and wealth was bestowed upon the religious structures as on the walls and fortifications. The Cathedral and the church of San Juan de Dios, the latter the most conspicuous structure in the city, with its double towers and its immense monastery adjoining, became the special recipients of the liberal outpourings of a community rich not only in material wealth, but in culture and refinement as well. The latter church in particular was the object of veneration of the patrons of America's only Saint, the beneficent Pedro Claver, whose whitened bones now repose in a wonderful glass coffin bound with strips of gold beneath its magnificent marble altar. In the central plaza of the city still stands the building erected to house the Holy Inquisition, so well preserved that it yet serves as a dwelling. Adjacent to it, and lining the plaza, are spacious colonial edifices, once the homes of wealth and culture, each shaded by graceful palms and each enclosing its inner garden, or patio, where tropical plants and aromatic shrubs riot in richest color and fragrance throughout the year.
In the halcyon days of Cartagena's greatness, when, under the protection of the powerful mother-country, her commerce extended to the confines of the known world, her streets and markets presented a scene of industry and activity wholly foreign to her in these latter days of her decadence. From her port the rich traffic which once centered in this thriving city moved, in constantly swelling volume, in every direction. In her marts were formulated those audacious plans which later took shape in ever-memorable expeditions up the Magdalena and Cauca rivers in search of gold, or to establish new colonies and extend the city's sphere of influence. From her gates were launched those projects which had for their object the discovery of the mysterious regions where rivers were said to flow over sands of pure gold and silver, or the kingdom of El Dorado, where native potentates sprinkled their bodies with gold dust before bathing in the streams sacred to their deities. From this city the bold Quesada set out on the exploits of discovery and conquest which opened to the world the rich plateau of Bogotá, and ranked him among the greatest of the Conquistadores. In those days a canal had been cut through the swamps and dense coast lowlands to the majestic Magdalena river, some sixty-five miles distant, where a riverine town was founded and given the name of Calamar, the name Pedro de Heredia had first bestowed upon Cartagena. Through this dique the city's merchant vessels passed to the great arterial stream beyond, and thence some thousand miles south into the heart of the rich and little known regions of upper Colombia. To-day, like the grass-grown streets of the ancient city, this canal, choked with weeds and débris, is but a green and turbid pool, but yet a reminder of the faded glory of the famous old town which played such a dramatic rôle in that age of desperate courage.
In the finished town of Cartagena Spain's dreams of imperial pomp and magnificence were externalized. In her history the tragedy of the New World drama has been preserved. To-day, sunk in decadence, surrounded by the old mediaeval flavor, and steeped in the romance of an age of chivalry forever past, her muniments and donjons, her gray, crenelated walls and time-defying structures continue to express that dogged tenacity of belief and stern defiance of unorthodox opinion which for two hundred years maintained the Inquisition within her gates and sacrificed her fair sons and daughters to an undemonstrable creed. The heavy air of ecclesiasticism still hangs over her. The priests and monks who accompanied every sanguinary expedition of the Conquistadores, ready at all times to absolve any desperado who might slay a harmless Indian in the name of Christ, have their successors to-day in the astute and untiring sons of Rome, who conserve the interests of Holy Church within these battered walls and guard their portals against the entrance of radical thought. Heredia had scarcely founded the city when King Philip sent it a Bishop. And less than a decade later the Cathedral, which to-day stands as the center of the episcopal See, was begun.
The Cathedral, though less imposing than the church of San Juan de Dios, is a fine example of the ecclesiastical architecture of the colonial era. Occupying a central position in the city, its ever-open doors invite rich and poor alike, citizen and stranger, to enter and linger in the refreshing atmosphere within, where the subdued light and cool shadows of the great nave and chapels afford a grateful respite from the glare and heat of the streets without. Massive in exterior appearance, and not beautiful within, the Cathedral nevertheless exhibits a construction which is at once broad, simple and harmonious. The nave is more than usually wide between its main piers, and its rounded arches are lofty and well proportioned. Excellent portraits of former Bishops adorn its white walls, and narrow rectangular windows at frequent intervals admit a dim, mellow light through their dark panes. Before one of these windows--apparently with no thought of incongruity in the exhibition of such a gruesome object attached to a Christian church--there has been affixed an iron grating, said to have served the Holy Inquisition as a gridiron on which to roast its heretical victims. Within, an ambulatory, supported on the first tier of arches, affords a walk along either side of the nave, and leads to the winding stairway of the bell tower. At one end of this ambulatory, its entrance commanding a full view of the nave and the capilla mayor, with its exquisitely carved marble altar, is located the Bishop's sanctum. It was here that the young Spanish priest, Josè de Rincón, stood before the Bishop of Cartagena on the certain midday to which reference was made in the opening chapter of this recital, and received with dull ears the ecclesiastical order which removed him still farther from the world and doomed him to a living burial in the crumbling town of Simití, in the wilderness of forgotten Guamocó.