Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/176

RV 108 (Rh) which Dame Elspeth had exhibited. Edward pleaded a want of sufficient vocation to so serious a profession, his reluctance to leave his mother, and other objections which the sub-prior treated as evasive.

'I plainly perceive,' he said one day in answer to them, 'that the devil has his factors as well as Heaven, and that they are equally, or alas! the former are perhaps more active, in bespeaking for their master the first of the market. I trust, young man, that neither idleness, nor licentious pleasure, nor the love of worldly gain and worldly grandeur, the chief baits with which the great Fisher of souls conceals his hook, are the causes of your declining the career to which I would incite you. But above all I trust—above all I hope—that the vanity of superior knowledge, a sin with which those who have made proficiency in learning are most frequently beset, has not led you into the awful hazard of listening to the dangerous doctrines which aie now afloat concerning religion. Better for you that you were as grossly ignorant as the beasts which perish, than that the pride of knowledge should induce you to lend an ear to the voice of heretics.' Edward Glendinning listened to the rebuke with a downcast look, and failed not, when it was concluded, earnestly to vindicate himself from the charge of having pushed his studies into any subjects which the church inhibited; and so the monk was left to form vain conjectures respecting the cause of his reluctance to embrace the monastic state.

It is an old proverb, used by Chaucer, and quoted by Elizabeth, that 'the greatest clerks are not the wisest men'; and it is as true as if the poet had not rhymed or the queen reasoned on it. If Father Eustace had not had his thoughts turned so much to the progress of heresy and so little to what was passing in the tower, he might have read, in the speaking eyes of Mary Avenel, now a girl of fourteen or fifteen, reasons which might disincline her youthful companion towards the monastic vows. I have said that she also was a promising pupil of the good father, upon whom her innocent and infantine beauty had an effect of which he was himself, perhaps, unconscious. Her rank and expectations entitled her to be taught the arts of reading and writing; and each lesson which the monk