l
gums.

Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic
religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage--the
bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass. Asceticism,
though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence
extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from
controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for
their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing: a
neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when we
do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us: we
have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood. But before
we taste that happiness we must perform our penance; 'No living happiness
can be for the unclean,' as the holy father preached to his flock of the
monastery dispersing at matins.

Ay, but penance? penance? Is there not such a thing as the doing of
penance out of the Church, in the manly fashion? So to regain the right
to be numbered among the captains of the world's fighting men,
incontestably the best of comrades, whether or no they led away on a
cataract leap at the gates of life. Boldly to say we did a wrong will
clear our sky for a few shattering peals.

The penitential act means, youth put behind us, and a steady course
ahead. But, for the keeping of a steady course, men made of blood in the
walks of the world must be steadied. Say it plainly-mated. There is the
humiliating point of our human condition. We must have beside us and
close beside us the woman we have learned to respect; supposing ourselves
lucky enough to have found her; 'that required other scale of the human
balance,' as Woodseer calls her now he has got her, wiser than Lord
Feltre in reference to men and women. We get no balance without her. That
is apparently the positive law; and by reason of men's wretched
enslavement, it is the dance to dissolution when we have not honourable
union with women. Feltre's view of women sees the devilish or the
angelical; and to most men women are knaves or ninnies. Hence do we
behold rascals or imbeciles in the offspring of most men.

He embraced the respected woman's character, with the usual effect:--to
see with her sight; and she beheld a speckled creature of the
intermittent whims and moods and spites; the universal Patron, whose
ambition to be leader of his world made him handle foul brutes--co