NARRATIVE OF THE CONVERSION AND SUFFERINGS OF SARAH DOHERTY

(Continued from last issue)

They got him sitting down to breakfast, and as full of illnature as could be desired. His words were high. He commanded them to depart from his threshold, and threatened violence if they disobeyed. But Mr. Murphy spoke a damper to him in a single sentence. As a lawyer employed by Mrs. O’Neill, he demanded his daughter to be immediately delivered up to her mistress, and, under a severe penalty, dared him to remove her, till the period of her stipulated service should expire. And the better to awe the old fellow, he hung up a threatening before him, that if he should be obstinate, the public prosecutor might be induced to make him sweat for the violence he had done her person, in forcibly making her prisoner, without legal cause.

The terror of the law had the due effect. Doherty, after having been convinced that Mrs. O’Neill could demand Sarah till the term, promised immediately to release her. He did so; but did it with a grudge. His looks were those of a tiger, who has lost his prey; and they seemed to speak revenge at some future season, for having been thus interrupted, and for a time outwitted, in his determinations to persecute. Hard words were spoken to Sarah, while he was in the act of releasing her,—words, that expressed all which seemed threatened in his countenance.

CHAPTER XIII

Renunciation of Popery

Old Doherty lost no time in informing Father Flanagan of the mournful change his daughter had undergone. The priest had foreseen it, but ascribed the whole to the heretical influence of Mrs. 0”Neill. His opinion was, that till Sarah’s period of service had expired, it would be impossible to be severe with her; and that at the expiry of it, a few threatenings would bring her to her senses. It grieved him, that her father had been outwitted in his wellmeant attempts to overawe her; but as matters stood, he thought a crafty gentleness the wisest treatment she could get.

His opinion scarcely suited the fiery spirit of Doherty. The old wrathful, dogged man, conceived himself grievously disgraced by her defection, and felt the power her mistress had over her for three months to come, a sad eyesore. Not a day passed without numberless curses upon the old hag who had defeated his pious intentions; and, in spite of his virtuous zeal, continued to deceive his daughter with his damnable heresies. Even the priest was rather askancely looked at, for his apparent coldness in the church’s cause. What Flanagan called prudence and policy, was hardly consistent with the heat and decision of an apostle of his Holiness.

While grudges, and a purposed revenge were thus fastening in the bosom of her father, Sarah, during the three weeks that succeeded her escape from his cruelty, was meditating a formal renunciation of Popery to the priest, and fortifying her mind for the interview. She had applied to be received as a member of the little Independent Church, with which her mistress worshipped, and thought, that before her case was decided by them, it was her duty regularly to abjure her former errors.

Her interview with Flanagan was long. He had the mind, if not the order of a Jesuit. At first he professed great ingenousness and candour, and promised that if she would state her reasons, and allow him to state his, either she would convert him or he would convert her.

It was well that Sarah had prepared herself for the chance of such a reception. She carried a small Bible in her pocket, and had carefully marked the passages she had found opposed to the various tenets of Popery. On being asked a reason for abandoning this doctrine and the next, she produced not one reason but several, and produced them in the language of God himself.

This was what the priest did not expect. He supposed her to have been led away by the mere cant of Mrs. O’Neill, and imagined that he would soon put her to silence. The array of texts she placed before him, therefore, dismayed and confounded him. He attempted replies, but seemed like a child brandishing a straw. His skill and generalship forsook him in trying to explain away the Scripture. He impugned the accuracy of the authorized translation; but Sarah having asked to see a copy of the Douay version, showed that even it taught the same doctrine. He pleaded the church’s prerogative as the only right interpreter of the Bible. But she answered, that the Scriptures themselves were able to make one wise to salvation. He argued that the unlearned could not possibly understand them; but she proved that Christ commanded them to be searched by all, poor and rich, learned and illiterate. He sheltered himself, “beneath the wings of the fathers;” but she rejoined, that no man on earth should be called master. God and the Bible alone being infallible authority in matters of religion.

These were the heads of the conversation. Purgatory indeed, the supremacy of Peter, transsubstantiation, the worship of images, penances, confession, works of supererogation, and other doctrines of Popery, were glanced at. But Sarah’s ready and opposite quotations from God’s word, was so unwelcome and confounding to the priest, that he was glad to reduce the controversy he had provoked, to the mere preliminary questions of the church’s’ infallibility, and the inability of the unlearned to understand the Bible. His conscience whispered, that the unassuming girl before him, was master of more argument than himself. The word of God was a weapon rather too edgy: it cut and dismayed him; and he secretly cursed the hour when it found its way into the English language. But was he convinced? To be so was at his peril. It would have been perjury, a breach of one of the most solemn oaths a man can sware. Why then did he promise, that if Sarah should have the best of the argument, he would confess himself beaten. He was a Jesuit,—a Jesuit we have said, if not in order at least in spirit. And he well knew how to suit his tone and his conduct to a change of circumstances. Professions of ingenousness had failed him: affectation of candour had failed him: reasoning had failed him: appeals to the sense of Popish commentators, and the opinions of the fathers, had failed him. What then must he do ? Do ? as all like him had done before; terrify and threaten, and alarm, till he had duped his victim. It mattered not that he had recommended crafty kindness as the best policy: his spirit was soured, his pride offended, the church insulted, at finding that Sarah was not the mere creature of designing cant he had imagined. She had turned out a systematic, settled, incorrigible, heretic, and required all the thunders of the Vatican to be rolled around her ears. Oh! the choler, the reeling eyes, the blown cheeks, and demon look of the man, when elevating his hand, and assuming an attitude of mock almightiness. He swore by Mary and Peter, and all the saints in heaven, that he would roast his victim with the church’s fire, and chain her down in the thick darkness of her anathemas, till she repented a thousand times over—and repented in vain—the mortal sin of abjuring allegiance to his Holiness. “But Sarah will you not save yourself from such an awful fate, by returning to the bosom of the church,” said he, softening his tone, and trying to improve the intended effects of his terrible denunciations.

“Sir, till I see with other eyes than I do now, I would sin against God and my own conscience, if I did not testify against the errors of the church of Rome.”

“But you are ruined and undone, an outcast from God, and a child of hell, if you do not return to her communion.”

“It is a man who tells me so; and it is a small matter to be judged of man’s judgment. He that judgeth me is the Lord. I am satisfied in my own mind, that, by simply believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, I shall be saved through his blood; and that if I were any more to acknowledge the super stitious rites of your church, I would deny His gospel, and be unworthy of eternal life.”

“You speak strongly enough, do you know the consequences of what you have said; and are you prepared to endure them? God’s frown, the church’s wrath, hell and the company of devils, eternally await you. Do you know that? Are you ready for such punishment? Can you bear it? Think a moment before you answer; for if you are obstinate this once, I will declare you beyond the reach of pardon; and next Sunday I will excommunicate and reprobate you in the presence of all.”

“Sir, I set the church’s curses at defiance. My hope for eternal life is in the blood of Christ; and, as I value the cleansing power of the blood, divine grace, I trust, will ever prevent me from countenancing again the awful errors of Popery. So do your worst. And, sir, as I may perhaps never speak to you again on earth, I solemnly warn you, in the prospect of our standing before the judgmentseat of Christ, of all our works being tried by fire, and of our everlasting fate being determined according to God’s blessed word, which you strive to keep from poor deluded creatures;— in that solemn prospect, I warn you of the awful guilt you incur in deceiving precious souls. You betray and ruin them. Jehovah declares that men can be saved only by the death of Christ; but you teach them that they will be saved by your worthless absolutions, by the saints’ prayers, and their own penances. Sir, the blood of souls is on you, and will be required at your hands. Woeful will be your last reckoning with God, if you shake not off from yourself, and your poor deluded people, those gross errors which I now abjure.”

Sarah uttered this speech with a boldness and animation that astonished herself. For a time it disarmed Father Flanagan. He stood in speechless confusion, and saw the girl leaving the room, without his having the courage to say a syllable in reply. There was something in her looks while she spoke, that gave a fearful power to her words. It seemed as if there was more of God than of man in the feelings that fired her. Never had he been so spoken to in his life; and the persons who stood before him with authority, and addressed him in a tone so prophetic and superhuman, was a female, an apostate, a heretic!

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