'In other words,' he said after a pause, 'God offers you one discipline,
and you would choose another. Well, the Lord gave the choice to David of
what rod he would be scourged with; but it always has seemed to me that the
choice was an added punishment. I would not have chosen. I would have left
all to His Divine Majesty! This cross is not of your own making; it comes
to you from God. Is it not the most signal proof of His love? He asks of
you what only the strongest can bear; gives you just time to serve Him with
the best. As I said before, is it not His way of honouring His creature?'

Eleanor sat without speaking, her delicate head drooping.

'And, Madame,' the priest continued with a changed voice, 'you say that
creeds and dogmas mean nothing to you. How can I, who am now cast out
from the Visible Church, uphold them to you--attempt to bind them on your
conscience? But one thing I can do, whether as man or priest; I can bid you
ask yourself whether in truth _Christ_ means nothing to you--and Calvary
nothing?'

He paused, staring at her with his bright and yet unseeing eyes, the wave
of feeling rising within him to a force and power born of recent storm, of
the personal wrestling with a personal anguish.

'Why is it'--he resumed, each word low and pleading,--'that this divine
figure is enshrined, if not in all our affections--at least in all our
imaginations? Why is it that at the heart of this modern world, with all
its love of gold, its thirst for knowledge, its desire for pleasure, there
still lives and burns '--

--He held out his two strong clenched hands, quivering, as though he held
in them the vibrating heart of man--