lant devotion, the Bishop, a worthy pastor for
such a sheep, passed the greater portion of his time in the intrigues of
petticoats and sacristies, and left to the young secretary the care of
matters spiritual.

It was he who, like Gil-Blas, composed the mandates and sometimes the
sermons of Monseigneur.

This confidence did not fail to arouse secret storms in the episcopal
guest-chamber.

A Grand-Vicar, jealous of the influence which the young Abbe was assuming
over his master's mind, had resolved upon his dismissal and fall.

With a church-man's tortuous diplomacy, he pried into the young man's
heart, as yet fresh and inexperienced.

He insinuated himself into the most hidden recesses of his conscience,
seized, so to say, in their flight the timid fleeting transports of his
thought, of his vigorous imagination, and soon discovered with secret
satisfaction that he was straying from the ancient path of orthodoxy.

Marcel, indeed, belonged to that younger generation of the clergy which
believes that everything which alienates the Church from new ideas, brings
it nearer to its ruin. And the day when the foolish Pius IX presumed to
proclaim and define, to the great joy of free-thinkers and the enemies of
Catholicism, the ridiculous dogma of the Immaculate Conception in the
presence of two hundred dumb complaisant prelates, on that day he
experienced profound grief. According to his ideas this was the severest
blow which had been inflicted on the foundations of the Church for
centuries.

He had studied theology deeply, but he had not confined himself to the
letter; he believed he saw something beyond.

--The letter killeth, he said, the spirit giveth life.

--The spirit giveth life when it is wholesome and pure, the Grand-Vicar
answered him with a smile, but is it healthy in a young man who believes
himself to be wiser than his elders?

Marcel then without mistrust and urged by questions, developed his
theories. He believed in the absolute equality of men before God, in the
transmutation of souls: and the resurrection of the flesh seemed to him
the utmost absurdity. He quite thought that there were future rewards and
penalties, but he had too much faith in the goodness of God to suppose
that the expiation could be eternal. He allied himself in that to the
Universalists, who were, he said, the most reasonable sect of American
Protestantism.

--Reasonable! reasonable! repeated the Grand-Vicar scoffingly; in truth,