Now all was
changed. In the midst of rubbish and desolation, seven or eight old
men, bent and shaken as much by grief and fear as by age, shrouded
hastily in the proscribed dress of their order, wandered like a
procession of spectres, from the door which had been thrown open, up
through the encumbered passage, to the high altar, there to instal
their elected Superior a chief of ruins. It was like a band of
bewildered travellers choosing a chief in the wilderness of Arabia; or
a shipwrecked crew electing a captain upon the barren island on which
fate has thrown them.
They who, in peaceful times, are most ambitious of authority among
others, shrink from the competition at such eventful periods, when
neither ease nor parade attend the possession of it, and when it gives
only a painful pre-eminence both in danger and in labour, and exposes
the ill-fated chieftain to the murmurs of his discontented associates,
as well as to the first assault of the common enemy. But he on whom
the office of the Abbot of Saint Mary's was now conferred, had a mind
fitted for the situation to which he was called. Bold and
enthusiastic, yet generous and forgiving--wise and skilful, yet
zealous and prompt--he wanted but a better cause than the support of a
decaying superstition, to have raised him to the rank of a truly great
man. But as the end crowns the work, it also forms the rule by which
it must be ultimately judged; and those who, with sincerity and
generosity, fight and fall in an evil cause, posterity can only
compassionate as victims of a generous but fatal error.
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