ience if your soul
be in revolt? I have seen you, my son, fall into more errors than
Sabellius, Alius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Manes, Pelagius, and Pachosius
combined, and revive, before your twentieth year, twelve centuries of
peculiar opinions. It is true that you have not been very obstinate
in any of them, but your successive recantations appear to betray less
submission to our Holy Mother the Church than eagerness to rush from one
error to another, to leap from Manicheeism to Sabellianism, and from
the crime of the Albigenses to the ignominies of the Vaudois."

Sulpice listened to this discourse with a contrite heart, a simplicity
of mind and submissiveness, that drew tears from the great St. Nicolas.

"I deplore, repudiate, condemn, reprove, detest, execrate, and abominate
my errors, past, present, and future," he said. "I submit myself to the
Church fully and entirely, totally and generally, purely and simply; and
I have no belief but her belief, no faith but her faith, no knowledge
but her knowledge: I neither see, hear, nor feel, save only through her.
She might tell me that the fly which has but now settled on the nose
of the Deacon Modernus was a camel, and I should incontinently, without
dispute, contest, murmur, resistance, hesitation or doubt, believe,
declare, proclaim, and confess, under torture and unto death, that it
was a camel that settled on the nose of the Deacon Modernus. For the
Church is the Fountain of Truth, and I am nought by myself but a vile
receptacle of Error."

"Take care, my father," said Modernus. "Sulpice is capable of overdoing
submission to the Church even to the point of Heresy. Do you not see
that he submits with frenzy, in transports and swooning? Is wallowing in
submission a good way of submitting? He is annihilating himself; he is
committing suicide."

But the Bishop reprimanded his deacon for holding such ideas, which
were contrary to charity, and sent the postulant to the noviciate of the
mendicant friars of Trinqueballe.

Alas, at the end of a year those priests, till then so quiet and humble,
were torn by frightful schisms, plunged into a thousand errors against
the Catholic truth, their days filled with disorder, and their souls
with sedition! Sulpice inspired the brothers with this poison. He
sustained against his superiors that there was no longer any true Pope,
since miracles no longer accompanied the elections of the Sovereign
Pontiffs; nor, rightly speaking, any Chu