Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/68

58 and sinner. To them all things palpitated in a Divine Mist of Benignity and Tenderness — the terrorist and the rigorist on the one hand; on the other, serenity, charity, and compassion.

Now there was a certain Brother Matthias in this convent — the hardest, bitterest zealot in the community, whom even his own partisans looked at with dread. Of his birth little was known, for all are equal in Religion, but the knotted joints of his hairy hands, the hair which bristled black against his low furrowed brow, were those of a peasant. No arm so strong or merciless as his to wield the discipline on recalcitrant shoulders (neither, it is fair to state, did he spare his own). The more Blood the more Religion; the more Blood the more Heaven. He practised austerely all the theological virtues as far as his lights and his mental capacity permitted, and it was as hard and as stubborn as the clods which he had ploughed in his youth. He did not despise, but bitterly loathed, all books or learning as the works and lures of Satan. If he had had his will he would have burnt the convent library long ago in the big cloister, all except the Breviary and the offices therein contained. The liberal Arts, and those who practised or had any skill in them, he would fain have banished from the convent. The flowers even that grew in the friars garden he neither smelt nor looked at. They were beautiful, and Sin lurked in the heart of the rose, and all the pleasures of the senses, and all the harmonies of sound. It was a small, black, narrow world that mind of his, heaped up with the impenetrable shadows of Ignorance, Intolerance, Contempt, and Fear.

"Better he went and dug in the vineyard," he would mutter sourly, when he saw some studious Brother absorbed in a black-letter Tome of Latinity in the monastery library. Once when Fray Blas the sculptor had finished one of his elaborate crucifixes Rh