On to this
melodramatic subject, wilfully rendered obscure, and really
incomprehensible, the novelist did his best to tack various
illustrations of Catholic repentance. He intended the book to be the
glorification of Catholicism, the refutation of Protestantism, the
embodiment of virtues private and social in people who bowed
themselves to his ideal of faith; the story he used simply as a thread
to connect these things together. Consequently, the action is
intermittent, being checked by irrelevant episodes, and by long
tirades on agriculture, sociology, and on other theories set forth by
the writer with much zeal but also with much acrimony. Catholicism is
asserted to be the only Church which has shown humanity its way of
safety; Tascheron's sister, who returns from America, is made to
relate that in a certain place where Catholic influence prevailed, the
Protestants were very soon chased away. To this religion of such
charming mansuetude whenever it has the upper hand, a Protestant
engineer named Gerard is converted by puerile arguments which in any
other domain than the theological would seem to be the divagations of
a lunatic; and the Cure Bonnet proclaims the necessity of passive
obedience by the masses to the Church's rule in matters civil as well
as ecclesiastic.
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