inted with our end and our means. Do not despise,
then, to sound the character of this king ever and again, and be certain
you will always find in him some new hidden recess, some surprising
peculiarity. We have spoken of him as a husband and the father of a
family, but of his religious and political standing I have as yet told
you nothing. And yet that, my child, is the principal point in his whole
character.

"In the first place, then, Jane, I will tell you a secret. The king, who
has constituted himself high-priest of his Church--whom the pope once
called 'the Knight of the Truth and the Faith'--the king has at the
bottom of his heart no religion. He is a wavering reed, which the wind
turns this way to-day, and that way to-morrow. He knows not his own
will, and, coquetting with both parties, to-day he is a heretic, in
order to exhibit himself as a strong, unprejudiced, enlightened man;
to-morrow a Catholic, in order to show himself an obedient and humble
servant of God, who seeks and finds his happiness only in love and
piety. But for both confessions of faith he possesses at heart
a profound indifference; and had the pope at that time placed no
difficulties in his way, had he consented to his divorce from Catharine,
Henry would have always remained a very good and active servant of
the Catholic Church. But they were imprudent enough to irritate him by
contradiction; they stimulated his vanity and pride to resistance; and
so Henry became a church reformer, not from conviction, but out of pure
love of opposition. And that, my child, you must never forget, for, by
means of this lever, you may very well convert him again to a devout,
dutiful, and obedient servant of our holy Church. He has renounced the
pope, and usurped the supremacy of the Church, but he cannot summon up
courage to carry out his work and throw himself wholly into the arms
of the Reformation. However much he has opposed the person of the pope,
still he has always remained devoted to the Church, although perhaps he
does not know it himself. He is no Catholic, and he hears mass; he has
broken up the monasteries, and yet forbids priests to marry; he has the
Lord's supper administered under both kinds, and believes in the real
transubstantiation of the wine into the Redeemer's holy blood. He
destroys the convents, and yet commands that vows of chastity, spoken by
man or woman, must be faithfully kept; and lastly, auricular confession
is still a necessary c