Mary of Oignies, who every day inflicted on her most holy person
eleven hundred stripes in honour of that all-perfect maiden!'

'Such an honour, I could have thought, would have pleased better
Kali, the murder-goddess of the Thugs,' thought Lancelot to himself;
but he had not the heart to say it, and he only replied,--

'So torture propitiates the Virgin? That explains the strange story
I read lately, of her having appeared in the Cevennes, and informed
the peasantry that she had sent the potato disease on account of
their neglecting her shrines; that unless they repented, she would
next year destroy their cattle; and the third year, themselves.'

'Why not?' asked poor Luke.

'Why not, indeed? If God is to be capricious, proud, revengeful,
why not the Son of God? And if the Son of God, why not His mother?'

'You judge spiritual feelings by the carnal test of the
understanding; your Protestant horror of asceticism lies at the root
of all you say. How can you comprehend the self-satisfaction, the
absolute delight, of self-punishment?'

'So far from it, I have always had an infinite respect for
asceticism, as a noble and manful thing--the only manful thing to my
eyes left in popery; and fast dying out of that under Jesuit
influence. You recollect the quarrel between the Tablet and the
Jesuits, over Faber's unlucky honesty about St. Rose of Lima? . . .
But, really, as long as you honour asceticism as a means of
appeasing the angry deities, I shall prefer to St. Dominic's cuirass