... It
were better for me to fall into the hands of man than to disobey the
command of my Lord." The saint had interpreted the will of God, and the
archbishop, sanctioning a sudden rumour that the deceased had received
absolution at the eleventh hour, yielded. But the bishop's yielding by
no means countenanced the belief that God might, for once, tolerate the
body of an excommunicate in sacred ground, far from it--the vision of
the abbess Hildegarde had merely served to correct an error.
All those who dared to oppose the clergy by word or deed were doomed to
everlasting perdition--this was a fact which it were futile to doubt; at
the most, a man shrugged his shoulders at certain damnation for the sake
of mundane pleasures--a rich legacy in the hour of death might save him.
Not infrequently the fear of the devil was transformed into
indifference, and sometimes even into demonolatry. A single ungodly
thought might involve eternal death, and as many a man, more
particularly many a priest, realised his inability to live continuously
in the presence of God, he surrendered his soul to the anti-god, not
from a longing for the pleasures of the senses, but from despair.
Pages:
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79