"'Like Ishmael, our hand is against every man, and every man's hand is against us. This is the lot of the brigand, as we all know. Born and bred in danger, nurtured from the breast, not with the milk of human kindness, but by the blood of his fellow men; his childish joys, the groans and sufferings of his mutilated victims; feasting on horrors from his earliest youth, unbridled and brutal in his appetites, his highest ambition through life to be a hardier ruffian than his father before him. "'Have we not, my friends, committed every sort of atrocity of which degraded humanity is capable? Nay, revelled in it, impiously defying that very God whom we ought humbly and reverently to thank as the Author of our beings? Let each of us look back upon our past lives and ask ourselves how we have thanked Almighty God for his innumerable blessings. "'How have we repaid His ineffable love and care over us? Has it not been by subverting His wise laws, despising His holy ordinances, brutalising our natures, even to a degree lower than the very brutes themselves? My brethren, we may be powerful against the weak and against the law, yet there is One above us more powerful than ourselves, to Whom we shall all one day have to give an account. Let us fight no longer against God; for what is man when matched against Omnipotence. Deem it not cowardice, my friends, to relinquish a life of evil now that your souls have received the light of truth, but rather thank God for His infinite mercy in vouchsafing so great a miracle through His Holy Mother to save our souls from the bottomless pit. "'I confess that almost from my earliest youth I never have looked upon religion as aught but priest-craft, and scoffed at all miracles as tricks of the priesthood to impose upon the ignorant and simple; but what shall we say, my brethren, to the miracle we have all so lately witnessed, or how shall we attempt to explain it away? Was it not the intervention of the blessed Virgin herself to scare us--the impious desecraters of her holy Church--from our evil ways? Could anything short of Divine power have raised the dead at the lonely hour of midnight within the very church itself, and have struck such terror into us, the hardy sons of the mountains, who never yet quailed before mortal man? "'Tell me, my friends, if in all my wild life, in all our joint villainies and wicked enterprises, in the very face of death, if you have ever known me to lack courage before to-night?' "'Never, Capitano, never,' cried several voices at once. 'We know your courage to be undaunted, and that there is no mortal man that you stand in awe of; but when it comes to running counter to spirits raised from the dead, or devils from hell, that is quite another sort of thing, and a man need be the arch-fiend himself to be without fear.'