Was it Pat Moloney who was to pass out of this darkness to "gaze with blessed eyes on the vision of Truth"? What a tremendous assertion made with such intensity of confidence! What a curious pageantry, too, so magnificent in its simplicity, was ordered, almost in tones of command, by the Church Militant for the reception of the charge she was giving up. The triumphant army of Martyrs was to come out to meet him; the Confessors were to "encircle him"; Michael was "to receive him as Prince of the armies of Heaven." Peter, Paul, John were to be in attendance. Nor in the rich strain was there any false ring of praise, or any attempt to veil the weakness of humanity. "Rejoice his soul, O Lord, with Thy Presence, and remember not the iniquities and excesses which, through the violence of anger or the heat of evil passion, he hath at any time committed. For, although he hath sinned, he hath not denied the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, but hath believed and hath had a zeal for God, and hath faithfully adored the Creator of all things." Was it an immense, an appalling impertinence--this great drama? Was it a mere mockery of the impotence and darkness of man's life? Would the priest say all this at the death-bed of the drunken beggar, of the voluptuous tyrant, of the woman who had been too hard or too weak in the bonds of the flesh? Was it a last great delusion, a last panacea given by the Church to those who had consented to bandage their eyes and crook their knees in childish obedience? Vaguely in her mind there flitted half phrases of the humanitarian, the materialist, the agnostic. It seemed as if their views of the wreck on the bed pressed upon all her consciousness. But, just as they had never succeeded in silencing the voice of that great drama of faith and prayer through the ages, so she could not dull to her own consciousness the strange, spiritual vitality that poured out in this triumphant call to the powers on high to come forth in all their glory to receive the inestimable treasure of the redeemed soul of Pat Moloney. CHAPTER XVI MOLLY'S LETTER TO HER MOTHER There followed after that night a quite new experience for Molly. It was the upheaval of an utterly uncultivated side of her nature. She was astonished to find that she had religious instincts, and that, instead of feeling that these instincts were foolish and irrational--a lower part of her nature,--they now seemed quite curiously rational and established in possession of her faculties. Her mind seemed more satisfied than it had ever been before. She did not know in what she believed, but she felt a different view of life in which men seemed less utterly mean, and women less of hypocrites. Externally it worked something in this way.