He
adhered to the forms of his religion rather because he felt it would
be dishonourable to change that of his fathers, than from any rational
conviction or sincere belief of its mysterious doctrines. It was a
principal part of the distinction which, in his own opinion, singled
him out from those with whom he lived, and gave him an additional,
though an internal and concealed reason, for contemning those of the
household who showed an undisguised dislike of him, and for hardening
himself against the instructions of the chaplain, Henry Warden.
"The fanatic preacher," he thought within himself, during some one of
the chaplain's frequent discourses against the Church of Rome, "he
little knows whose ears are receiving his profane doctrine, and with
what contempt and abhorrence they hear his blasphemies against the
holy religion by which kings have been crowned, and for which martyrs
have died!"
But in such proud feelings of defiance of heresy, as it was termed,
and of its professors, which associated the Catholic religion with a
sense of generous independence, and that of the Protestants with the
subjugation of his mind and temper to the direction of Mr. Warden,
began and ended the faith of Roland Graeme, who, independently of the
pride of singularity, sought not to understand, and had no one to
expound to him, the peculiarities of the tenets which he professed.
His regret, therefore, at missing the rosary which had been conveyed
to him through the hands of Father Ambrose, was rather the shame of a
soldier who has dropped his cockade, or badge of service, than that of
a zealous votary who had forgotten a visible symbol of his religion.
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