"But _do_ you believe in the Bible? Do you receive Revelation?
What limits are there to the wild, careless daring of your country and
sect. Pere Silas dropped dark hints."
By dint of persuasion, I made him half-define these hints; they
amounted to crafty Jesuit-slanders. That night M. Paul and I talked
seriously and closely. He pleaded, he argued. _I_ could not
argue--a fortunate incapacity; it needed but triumphant, logical
opposition to effect all the director wished to be effected; but I
could talk in my own way--the way M. Paul was used to--and of which he
could follow the meanderings and fill the hiatus, and pardon the
strange stammerings, strange to him no longer. At ease with him, I
could defend my creed and faith in my own fashion; in some degree I
could lull his prejudices. He was not satisfied when he went away,
hardly was he appeased; but he was made thoroughly to feel that
Protestants were not necessarily the irreverent Pagans his director
had insinuated; he was made to comprehend something of their mode of
honouring the Light, the Life, the Word; he was enabled partly to
perceive that, while their veneration for things venerable was not
quite like that cultivated in his Church, it had its own, perhaps,
deeper power--its own more solemn awe.
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