mbine 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, Jose returned to Rome, burning with
the holy desire to lend his influence to the institution of t