constables and soldiers of the garrison, and there dragged after a boat
in the sea! Think of it! On a bitter day in March this wretched woman
with the "defect of understanding" was to be dragged through the sea by
a rope tied to the tail of a boat! And if any owner, master, and crew of
any boat proved refractory by refusing to perform this service for the
restraining of vice, they were to be subject to fine and imprisonment!
When St. Patrick's Day came the weather was so stormy that no boat
could live in the bay, but on St. Germain's Day, about the height of the
market, the censure was performed. After undergoing the punishment the
miserable soul was apparently penitent, "according to her capacity,"
took the communion, and was "received into the peace of the Church."
Poor human ruin, defaced image of a woman, begrimed and buried soul,
unchaste, misshapen, incorrigible, no "juice of God's distilling" ever
"dropped into the core of her life," to such punishment she was doomed
by the tribunal of that saintly man, Bishop Thomas Wilson! She has met
him at another tribunal since then; not where she has crouched before
him, but where she has stood by his side. She has carried her great
account against him, to Him before whom the proudest are as chaff.
None spake when Wilson stood before
The Throne;
And He that sat thereon
Spake not; and all the presence-floor
Burnt deep with blushes, and the angels cast
Their faces downwards.--Then, at last,
Awe-stricken, he was ware
How on the emerald stair
A woman sat divinely clothed in white,
And at her knees four cherubs bright
That laid
Their heads within her lap. Then, trembling, he essayed
To speak--"Christ's mother, pity me!"
Then answered she,
"Sir, I am Katherine Kinrade." {*}
* Unpublished poem by the author of ''Fo'c's'le Yarns."
BISHOP WILSON'S LAST DAYS
Have I dashed your faith in my hero? Was he indeed the bitterest of
tyrants as well as the serenest of saints? Yet bethink you of the other
good men who have done evil deeds? King David and the wife of Uriah,
Mahomet and his adopted son; the gallery of memory is hung round with
many such portraits. Poor humanity, weak at the strongest, impure at
the purest; best take it as it is, and be content. Remember that a good
man's vices are generally the excess of his virtues. It was so with
Bishop Wilson. Remember, too, that it is not for what a man does, but
for what he means to do, that we love him or hate him in the end. And
in the end the Manx people loved Bishop Wilson, and still they bless his
memory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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