all the advances before they had taken the first
steps. The young girl had read in the priest's eyes the wish to accost her,
and he saw that he would be welcome.

Was anything more necessary? Therefore, mutually content, when they
separated, they each had the desire to see the other again.

It was very often then that they saw one another; but especially at the
morning Masses; then, when he turned towards the nave, and raising his look
towards the gallery encountered hers, he asked no other joy from heaven.

XXX.

SERAPHIC LOVE.

"How many times does it not occur
to me to blush at my tastes? to hide
them from myself? to feign with myself
that I have them not? to find some
covering for them beneath which I
conceal them, in order to play a part
a little less foolish in my own conscience?"

JULES SIMON (_Le Devoir_).

But one day the Cure awoke full of dismay. The first intoxication had
slightly dissipated, he had taken time to look closely within himself, and
when he sought to analyze in cool blood this new and ravishing sensation,
he saw the abyss beneath his feet.

"What! he said to himself, whither am I going? What am I doing? I, a
priest, a minister of the altar, I should be at that point a slave of sin;
I shall continue to cast myself from darkness to darkness until the
definite and final fall. Oh! Lord, stop me, come to my aid; suffer not this
shame and this crime."

But he altered his mind. When the devil has succeeded in bringing a soul to
sin, there is no artifice he does not use to blind him beforehand, and to
turn away his thought from everything capable of making him see the unhappy
state in which he is. That is what the Church teaches.

Soon he viewed this passion under a new aspect, and he asked himself why he
had not the right to love. Had not all the saints loved? Had not St. Jerome
loved St. Paula? Had not Francis de Sales loved Madame de Chantal? Had not
Fenelon loved Madame Guyon? St. Theresa, her spiritual director, and
Venillot, his cook?

Were there not two kinds of love? The ethereal, ideal, chaste, seraphic
love, the love of the creature grateful for the perfect work of the
creator; platonic love, free from all impurity, allowed to the virtuous
confessor for his virtuous penitent, the love of the wise man in fact;
or--the other. Then with that art of the rhetorician which sacred
scholasticism teaches to every Levite, he said to himself, "Yes, I can
love, for