Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/103

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
A SHAM IS WORSE THAN NOTHING.
87

and console, and bear for their flock the burdens which they cannot bear themselves. You ask me who will teach a fast young man? . . . . I answer, the Jesuit. Ay, start and sneer, at that delicate woman-like tenderness, that subtle instinctive sympathy, which you have never felt . . . . which is as new to me, alas, as it would be to you! For if there be none now-a-days to teach such as you, who is there who will teach such as me? Do not fancy that I have not craved and searched for teachers . . . . I went to one party long ago, and they commanded me, as the price of their sympathy, even of any thing but their denunciations, to ignore, if not to abjure, all the very points on which I came for light—my love for the Beautiful and the Symbolic—my desire to consecrate and christianize it—my longing for a human voice to tell me with authority that I was forgiven—my desire to find some practical and palpable communion between myself and the saints of old. They told me to cast away, as an accursed chaos, a thousand years of Christian history, and believe that the devil had been for ages . . . . just the ages I thought noblest, most faithful, most interpenetrated with the thought of God . . . . triumphant over that church with which He had promised to be till the end of the world. No . . . by-the-bye, they made two exceptions—of their own choosing. One in favour of the Albigenses . . . . who seemed to me, from the original documents, to have been very profligate Infidels, of whom the world was well rid . . . . and