Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/280

 added Friga, ‘the practical consideration is this, that a new and disobedient generation is growing up around you—I almost belong to it myself. This rising generation will insist upon your schools being ordered to its liking. It will not be enough for you to take Catholicism in its present unsatisfactory shape and wrap it up in a cover of good music and evening parties and entertainments, and pleasant outings with pleasant companions on holidays; you must recast the faith itself and make it palatable, not merely disguise it, otherwise your pupils will swallow the jam, but take care to spit out the pill.’

The cardinal looked up for a moment, and smiled at this realistic metaphor; then he asked, addressing both his visitors,—

‘But with what face could I go to the Church or to the world, and say that Christianity must yield its place to Venus?’

Lesbia at once replied,—

‘I cannot admit, Cardinal Power, that the worship of the Madonna, such as your Church is called upon to practise, and to some little extent does already practise, is accurately described as the cult of Venus. Love and beauty may be the sceptre of womanhood; but they are not womanhood itself. I cannot even recognise them as the sceptre, unless you are prepared to assign to those two words a vastly nobler meaning than they have hitherto borne in vulgar parlance. If by love you are prepared to signify that lifting up of the heart toward a superior being which finds its delight in the feeling of self-abasement to her, and cares for sensual gratifications only so far as they can be made by careful study and dicipline the most direct and apt vehicles of that adoration; and if by beauty you intend, not a mere harmony of form and quality, which may be found in various other things after their kind, but the very essence and