Betty, with the strange reserve that covered all her deepest thinking, whispered no hint of her own birth in the same faith to the old lady; she tried instead to win from the beautiful and pure and faded mind of Miss Flora some conception of God and the mysteries--only to find the little old lady’s concept, for all the disguises of her delicate mind, exceedingly crude and vague--that, in fact, she had absolutely no concept at all. She saw that it was the wide compassion of the mystic Man of Sorrows that gave, as to most Papists, the exquisite faith in their mysteries. Yet, like the most orthodox, she spoke of the old and the new dispensation--God then had not known His own mind. Puzzled with the great fact that God and Son were absolutely destructive of each other--one the God of War, the other the God of Peace--one the God of Vengeance, demanding Punishment, the other the God of Mercy, offering Forgiveness; the one choosing an indifferent race as a chosen people, the other rejecting that race; the book of the laws of the one obliterating the book of the laws of the other--the girl had awakened from her childhood and realized that she had eaten of the fruit of knowledge, and that before the judgment-seat of that knowledge the God of her childhood stood convicted of the very sins, from killing downwards, for which that same God had condemned man to eternal punishments; and, with the true instinct for justice and for the humanities, she forthwith rejected the God and gave all her affection to the Christ, who had thwarted, and by thwarting had confessed the injustice of God. And now, having so decided, and being in sight of a calm harbour of refuge, she found herself baffled with the fury of the factions that professed the Christ. The symbolism and the beauty of the Papist section beckoned her to Rome; but the genius of the child saw all things in the large, and was not to be led aside by details--she was repelled by the contradictions of its belief that at one turn appealed to reason, at the next rejected reason; repelled by its un-Christliness, repelled by the submission of the conscience to its priesthood, repelled by its condemnation of all outside its gates, repelled by its preposterous claims--by its belief in the real presence of the Christ in the wine and wafer of its sacraments. She had only that day come upon a copy of the Cautels, and as she read the cautions to priests, after partaking of the sacraments, that they should not wash their mouths or spit before breaking their fast in case of ejecting the body of Christ in their spittle or vomit, she was stung with shame that such puerile things should be expected of her intelligence--it were as though she had been struck across the face with a whip. The strong blood of the master race leaped in her veins, and she found herself unable to believe that the toys which had amused her infancy were really alive.