It was to Bérigny that I went for Mass. The curé spoke to me afterwards, as I was sitting under the shadow of the Calvary. He is a simple soul; but he talked with spirit and intelligence about his Church and his country. I found him still smarting under the well-meant fussiness of two old maids from Bournemouth who were at the Hôtel du Dauphin last month. It appears that they distributed Evangelical tracts in French, wherein the present troubles of the Church in France were explained as a divinely appointed punishment of Popery and as a divine call to the French people to embrace Scriptural truth. The curé spoke with fine scorn of that British sectarian animosity which hates the Pope ten times worse than the Devil. And he confirmed what I had learned from the more blatant Paris journals--that the so-called campaign against clericalism is at heart a campaign against Christianity, and not only against Christian dogma, but even against many ancient precepts of Christian morals. More. He confirmed what I have myself read in the speeches of deputies and even of Ministers--that the attack is not merely against Christianity, but against the whole idea of supernatural religion, and that it is avowedly an attempt to establish a lay state, a purely secular community trained from childhood to believe that all religion is superstition and that human science alone can teach men how to live and die. After the curé went home to break his fast, I still lingered in the churchyard. A new plank-monument had been raised during the week over a new tomb; and its jet-black letters on a snow-white ground reminded me of the resolve I had made to offer a De Profundis for the faithful dead. I found the place in my _paroissien_, and said the opening words aloud. The sound of my own voice in that sunny field of death frightened me, and I stopped. I began again, reading to myself. But it was of no use. I couldn’t go on. When it comes to downright earnest, you can’t skip from one religion to another. Lost in a crowd one can coquet with another religion, tolerate it, even enjoy its unfamiliar ancient ritual. But, with my De Profundis it was different. I couldn’t shed my Protestantism like an old cloak in the twinkling of an eye. Not that I felt, as I sat down again on the platform of the Calvary, that praying for the dead was false doctrine and superstitious error. I dared not say it was true; but still less dared I say that it was false. I thought of the two old maids from Bournemouth, their half-knowledge, their meddling; and I felt it would be, at the very least, an unpardonable impertinence to offer doubting prayers for needs that I could only half understand.