Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/265

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are unable to cope with, the movement of an ever-advancing and resistless force called Truth, and that God will shake down Rome rather than that the voice of Truth should be silenced.

The Abbé's declarations, as the Vatican emissary points out, mean his expulsion from the Church. Before the interview closes there comes the declaration by Cyrillon Vergniaud, the son of the Abbé, that he is "Gys Grandit," a powerful writer of essays that are the creed of a "Christian Democratic" party—that advocate of Truth to which the Abbé had referred. The announcement is startling to all three clerics, the more so as the young man proceeds to utter his views, a stern denunciation of the Church's practices, with such rebukes as: "Does not the glittering of the world's wealth piled into the Vatican,—useless wealth lying idle in the midst of hideous beggary and starvation,—proclaim with no uncertain voice, I know not the Man?" with the added declaration that there is no true representative of Christ in this world—either within or without the Romish Church—though even sceptics, while denying Christ's Divinity, are forced to own that His life and His actions were more Divine than those of any other creature in human shape that has ever walked the earth!

In the further argumentative passes between