Page 440 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

and with Jesuitical argument and silken softness of speech,
convert him by force to his own state of error—as was the
well-known custom of those intellectual gladiators, the
Priests of the Catholic Faith. North, on his side, left Flaherty
with regret. He had spent many a pleasant hour with him,
and knew him for a narrow-minded, conscientious, yet
laughter-loving creature, whose God was neither his belly
nor his breviary, but sometimes in one place and sometimes
in the other, according to the hour of the day, and the fasts
appointed for due mortification of the flesh. ‘A man who
would do Christian work in a jog-trot parish, or where men
lived too easily to sin harshly, but utterly unfit to cope with
Satan, as the British Government had transported him,’
was North’s sadly satirical reflection upon Father Flaherty,
as Port Arthur faded into indistinct beauty behind the swift-
sailing schooner. ‘God help those poor villains, for neither
parson nor priest can.’
He was right. North, the drunkard and self-torment-
ed, had a power for good, of which Meekin and the other
knew nothing. Not merely were the men incompetent and
self-indulgent, but they understood nothing of that fright-
ful capacity for agony which is deep in the soul of every
evil-doer. They might strike the rock as they chose with
sharpest-pointed machine-made pick of warranted Gospel
manufacture, stamped with the approval of eminent di-
vines of all ages, but the water of repentance and remorse
would not gush for them. They possessed not the frail rod
which alone was powerful to charm. They had no sympa-
thy, no knowledge, no experience. He who would touch the