ing and invites subtle praise; one is
presently aware of it, and then, with patience and determination, it is
in one's power to check and muzzle oneself. But my vice of pride is
wordless and underground; it does not come forth. I neither see nor hear
it. It wriggles and creeps in without a sound, and clutches me without
my having heard its approach!

"And the good Abbe answers: 'Be watchful and pray;' well, I am more than
willing, but the remedy is ineffectual, for aridity and outside
influences deprive it of its efficacy!

"As for outside suggestions--they never seem to come to me but in
prayer. It is enough that I kneel down and try to collect my thoughts,
they are at once dissipated. The mere purpose of prayer is like a stone
flung into a pool; everything is stirred up and comes to the top!

"And people who have not habits of religious practice fancy that there
is nothing easier than prayer. I should like to see them try. They could
then bear witness that profane imaginings, which leave them in peace at
all other times, always surge up unexpectedly, during prayer.

"Besides, what use is therein disputing the fact? Merely looking at a
sleeping vice is enough to wake it."

And his thoughts went back to that warm crypt. "Yes, no doubt, like all
the buildings of the Romanesque period, it is symbolical of the Old
Testament; but it is not simply gloomy and sad, for it is enveloping and
comforting, warm and tender! Admitting even that it is the figure in
stone of the older Dispensation, would it not seem that it symbolizes it
less as a whole, than as embodying more especially a select group of the
Holy Women who prefigured the Virgin in the earlier Scriptures? Is it
not the expression in stone of those passages in which the illustrious
women of the Bible are most conspicuous, who were, in a way, prophetic
incarnations of the New Eve?

"Hence this crypt would reproduce the most consoling and the most heroic
passages of the Sacred Book, for the Virgin is supreme in this
underground sanctuary; it is Hers rather than the terrible Adonai's, if
one may dare say so.

"And again, She is a very singular Virgin, who has inevitably remained
in harmony with Her surroundings: a Virgin black and rugged, and
stunted, like the rough-hewn shrine She inhabits.

"She is therefore, no doubt, the outcome of the same idea that conceived
of Christ as black and ugly because He had assumed the burthen of all
the sins of the world, the Chri