Philammon crushed the letter together in his hand, and strode from the house without a word. The philosopher had no gospel, then, for the harlot! No word for the sinner, the degraded! Destiny forsooth! She was to follow her destiny, and be base, miserable, self-condemned. She was to crush the voice of conscience and reason, as often as it awoke within her, and compel herself to believe that she was bound to be that which she knew herself bound not to be. She was to shut her eyes to that present palpable misery which was preaching to her, with the voice of God Himself, that the wages of sin are death. Dust she was, and unto dust she will return! Oh, glorious hope for her, for him, who felt as if an eternity of bliss would be worthless, if it parted him from his newfound treasure! Dust she was, and unto dust she must return!
Hapless Hypatia! If she must needs misapply, after the fashion of her school, a text or two here and there from the Hebrew Scriptures, what suicidal fantasy set her on quoting that one? For now, upon Philammon’s memory flashed up in letters of light, old words forgotten for months—and ere he was aware, he found himself repeating aloud and passionately, “I believe in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting,” … and then clear and fair arose before him the vision of the God-man, as He lay at meat in the Pharisee’s house; and of her who washed His feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. … And from the depths of his agonised heart arose the prayer, “Blessed Magdalene, intercede for her?”
So high he could rise, but not beyond. For the notion of that God-man was receding fast to more and more awful abysmal heights, in the minds of a generation who were forgetting His love in His power, and practically losing sight of His humanity in their eager doctrinal assertion of His Divinity. And Philammon’s heart reechoed the spirit of his age, when he felt that for an apostate like himself it were presumptuous to entreat for any light or help from the fountainhead itself. He who had denied his Lord, he who had voluntarily cut himself off from the communion of the Catholic Church—how could he restore himself? How could he appease the wrath of Him who died on the cross, save by years of bitter supplication and self-punishment? …
“Fool! Vain and ambitious fool that I have been! For this I threw away the faith of my childhood! For this I listened to words at which I shuddered; crushed down my own doubts and disgusts; tried to persuade myself that I could reconcile them with Christianity—that I could make a lie fit into the truth! For this I puffed myself up in the vain hope of becoming not as other men are—superior, forsooth, to my kind! It was not enough for me to be a man made in the image of God: but I must needs become a god myself, knowing good and evil.—And here is the end! I call upon my fine philosophy to help me once, in one real practical human struggle, and it folds its arms and sits serene and silent, smiling upon my misery! Oh! fool, fool, thou art filled with the fruit of thy own devices! Back to the old faith! Home again, then wanderer! And yet how home? Are not the gates shut against me? Perhaps against her too. … What if she, like me, were a baptized Christian?”
Terrible and all but hopeless that thought flashed across him, as in the first revulsion of his conscience he plunged utterly and implicitly back again into the faith of his childhood, and all the dark and cruel theories popular in his day rose up before him in all their terrors. In the innocent simplicity of the Laura he had never felt their force; but he felt them now. If Pelagia were a baptized woman, what was before her but unceasing penance? Before her, as before him, a life of cold and hunger, groans and tears, loneliness and hideous soul-sickening uncertainty. Life was a dungeon for them both henceforth. Be it so! There was nothing else to believe in. No other rock of hope in earth or heaven. That at least promised a possibility of forgiveness, of amendment, of virtue, of reward—ay, of everlasting bliss and glory; and even if she missed of that, better for her the cell in the desert than a life of self-contented impurity! If that latter were her destiny, as Hypatia said, she should at least die fighting against it, defying it, cursing it! Better virtue with hell, than sin with heaven! And Hypatia had not even promised her a heaven. The resurrection of the flesh was too carnal a notion for her refined and lofty creed. And so, his four months’ dream swept away in a moment, he hurried back to his chamber, with one fixed thought before him—the desert; a cell for Pelagia; another for himself. There they would repent, and pray, and mourn out life side by side, if perhaps God would have mercy upon their souls. Yet—perhaps, she might not have been baptized after all. And then she was safe. Like other converts from Paganism, she might become a catechumen, and go on to baptism, where the mystic water would wash away in a moment all the past, and she would begin life afresh, in the spotless robes of innocence. Yet he had been baptized, he knew from Arsenius, before he left Athens; and she was older than he. It was all but impossible: yet he would hope; and breathless with anxiety and excitement, he ran up the narrow stairs and found Miriam standing outside, her hand upon the bolt, apparently inclined to dispute
