Page:Walter Scott - The Monastery (Henry Frowde, 1912).djvu/485

RV 417 (Rh) judgement. Heaven hath smitten, it may be, the erring shepherd, and scattered the flock.'

'Think better of the Divine judgements,' said Warden. 'Not for thy sins, which are those of thy blinded education and circumstances; not for thine own sins, William Allan, art thou stricken, but for the accumulated guilt which thy misnamed church hath accumulated on her head and those of her votaries, by the errors and corruptions of ages.'

'Now, by my sure belief in the Rock of Peter? said the abbot, 'thou dost rekindle the last spark of human indignation for which my bosom has fuel. I thought I might not again have felt the impulse of earthly passion, and it is thy voice which once more calls me to the expression of human anger! yes, it is thy voice that comest to insult me in my hour of sorrow, with these blasphemous accusations of that church which hath kept the light of Christianity alive from the times of the Apostles till now.'

'From the times of the Apostles?' said the preacher, eagerly. 'Negatur Gulielme Allan, the primitive church differed as much from that of Rome, as did light from darkness, which, did time permit, I should speedily prove. And worse dost thou judge, in saying I come to insult thee in thy hour of affliction, being here, God wot, with the Christian wish of fulfilling an engagement I had made to my host, and of rendering myself to thy will while it had yet power to exercise aught upon me, and if it might so be, to mitigate in thy behalf the rage of the victors whom God hath sent as a scourge to thy obstinacy.'

'I will none of thy intercession? said the abbot, sternly; 'the dignity to which the church has exalted me, never should have swelled my bosom more proudly in the time of the highest prosperity, than it doth at this crisis. I ask nothing of thee, but the assurance that my lenity to thee hath been the means of perverting no soul to Satan, that I have not given to the wolf any of the stray lambs whom the Great Shepherd of souls had entrusted to my charge.'

'William Allan,' answered the Protestant, 'I will be sincere with thee. What I promised I have kept. I have withheld my voice from speaking even good things. But it has pleased Heaven to call the maiden Mary Avenel to a better sense of faith than thou and all the disciples of Rh