n a pilgrimage to
Our Lady of Loretto; but for himself, who held miracles impossible,
and if possible irrelevant, there could be no such compromise with a
creed whose very basis was miracle. True, there was a sense in which
Christ might be considered _os Dei_--the mouth of God,--but it was not
the sense in which the world understood it, the world which
caricatured all great things, which regarded piety and religion, and
absolutely all things related to greatness of soul, as burdens to be
laid aside after death, toils to be repaid by a soporific beatitude;
which made blessedness the prize of virtue instead of the synonym of
virtue. Nay, nay, not even the unexpected patronage of the Most Serene
Carl Ludwig could reconcile his thoughts with popular theology.

How curious these persistent attempts of friend and foe alike to
provide for his livelihood, and what mistaken reverence his persistent
rejections had brought him! People could not lift their hands high
enough in admiration because he followed the law of his nature,
because he preferred a simple living, simply earned, while for
criminals who followed equally the laws of their nature they had anger
rather than pity. As well praise the bee for yielding honey or the
rose for making fragrant the air. Certainly his character had more of
honey than of sting, of rose than of thorn; humility was an
unnecessary addition to the world's suffering; but that he did not
lack sting or thorn, his own sisters had discovered when they had
tried to keep their excommunicated brother out of his patrimony. How
puzzled Miriam and Rebekah had been by his forcing them at law to give
up the money and then presenting it to them. They could not see that
to prove the outcast Jew had yet his legal rights was a duty; the
money itself a burden. Yes, popular ethics was sadly to seek, and
involuntarily his hand stretched itself out and lovingly possessed
itself of the ever-growing manuscript of his _magnum opus_. His eye
caressed those serried concatenated propositions, resolving and
demonstrating the secret of the universe; the indirect outcome of his
yearning search for happiness, for some object of love that endured
amid the eternal flux, and in loving which he should find a perfect
and eternal joy. Riches, honor, the pleasures of sense--these held no
true and abiding bliss. The passion with which van den Ende's daughter
had agitated him had been wisely mastered, unavowed. But in the
Infinite Subs