“When you were a boy,” continued Mr. Aumerle, “you used often to express to me your desire to enter the ministry.”
“Oh, that’s all over,” replied Augustine quickly; “my views on many points have changed. I have discovered that there are many paths open to speculative thought besides the dry beaten one which you and all the pious world have been content for generations to tread.”
“There is nothing,” murmured Pride, “so hateful to an exalted spirit as travelling in a crowd.”
“Is it well,” said Aumerle, “to wander from the narrow path, in which so many have found happiness in life, and peace in death?”
“There are stumbling-blocks in that path,” replied Augustine; “difficulties which it would puzzle even a theologian like yourself to remove, and over which the learned and the zealous have wrangled from time immemorial. How can you explain to me this?” and the young man ran over, with rapid eloquence, one after another of the difficult questions which have for ages put human wisdom to fault. “How can you explain all this?” he repeated, at the close of his argument.
“These things are beyond the grasp of the human mind,” replied the clergyman; “they are not contrary to reason, but above it.”
“Reason is the guide allotted to intellectual man,” said Augustine; “I go as far as she leads me, and no further.”
“Reason is the guide that leads to the temple of revelation. There is an overwhelming mass of evidence, external and internal, to convince any unprejudiced mind that the Bible is the word of God. Prophecies accomplished, types fulfilled, the divine Spirit breathed through the pages, the unearthly perfection of One character there portrayed, with superhuman knowledge of the frailties and requirements of man; the devotion of the early witnesses to its truth, who sealed their testimony with their blood; the standing miracles foretold in the Scriptures, of the Jewish people scattered amongst all nations, and yet separate, and of a Church which, rising in an obscure land from the tomb of its Founder, has spread against the opposition of earth and hell, has swept away the barriers raised against it by temporal power and spiritual idolatry, and the natural opposition of every unregenerate heart, and which still goes on conquering and to conquer;—is not all this sufficient to bring reason to the position of the handmaid of religion, and make her, as I said at the first, the guide to the temple of revelation?”