in what you say. This is an instance—I would it were the sole one—of the power of the Enemy in these days. The matter must be sifted with a curious and careful hand.'
'Indeed,' said Elspeth, trying to catch and chime in with the ideas of the sub-prior, 'I have often thought the miller's folk at the monastery mill were far over careless in sifting our melder, and in bolting it too; some folk say they will not stick at whiles to put in a handful of ashes amongst Christian folk's corn-meal.'
'That shall be looked after also, dame,' said the sub-prior, not displeased to see that the good old woman went off on a false scent; 'and now, by your leave, I will see this lady; do you go before, and prepare her to see me.'
Dame Glendinning left the lower apartment accordingly, which the monk paced in anxious reflection, considering how he might best discharge, with humanity as well as with effect, the important duty imposed on him. He resolved to approach the bedside of the sick person with reprimands, mitigated only by a feeling for her weak condition—he determined, in case of her reply, to which late examples of hardened heretics might encourage her, to be prepared with answers to their customary scruples. High fraught, also, with zeal against her unauthorized intrusion into the priestly function by study of the Sacred Scriptures, he imagined to himself the answers which one of the modern school of heresy might return to him; the victorious refutation which should lay the disputant prostrate at the confessor's mercy; and the healing, yet awful exhortation, which, under pain of refusing the last consolations of religion, he designed to make to the penitent, conjuring her, as she loved her own soul's welfare, to disclose to him what she knew of the dark mystery of iniquity by which heresies were introduced into the most secluded spots of the very patrimony of the church herself; what agents they had who could thus glide, as it were unseen, from place to place, bring back the volume which the church had interdicted to the spots from which it had been removed under her express auspices; and who, by encouraging the daring and profane thirst after knowledge forbidden and useless to the laity, had encouraged the fisher of souls to use with effect his old bait of ambition and vainglory.
