“‘It is all very easy to talk,’ was all he could say in reply. ‘You are an independent and private person; I am a monk, and in a community. Do you not understand the difference? We depend upon superiors; they depend upon others. They have promised our votes, and what would you have me to do?’ We understood his allusion, and remembered how a brother monk had been banished to Abbeville for a similar cause.”
The writer is disposed to pity the monk as he relates with a melancholy tone how the Dominicans, who had from the time of St Thomas been such ardent defenders of the doctrine of grace, had been entrapped into making common cause with the Jesuits. The latter, availing themselves of the confusion and ignorance introduced by the Reformation, had disseminated their principles with great rapidity, and become masters of the popular belief; while the poor Dominicans found themselves in the predicament of either being denounced as Calvinists, and treated