Perhaps it is not fit that, even to you, I should display them; but my confidence is strong in thy wisdom and thy principles.

Know, then, that there is much chance that the Church of Rome will dissolve the union which she has herself formed, and release the Duke of Rothsay from his marriage with Marjory Douglas." Here he paused.
"And if the church hath power and will to do this," replied the maiden, "what influence can the divorce of the Duke from his wife produce on the fortunes of Catharine Glover ?" She looked at the priest anxiously as she spoke, and he had some apparent difficulty in framing his reply, for he looked on the ground while he answered her.
"What did beauty do for Catharine Logie?
Unless our fathers have told us falsely, it raised her to share the throne of David Bruce." "Did she live happy or die regretted, good father ?" asked Catharine, in the same calm and steady tone.
"She formed her alliance from temporal, and perhaps criminal, ambition," replied Father Clement; "and she found her reward in vanity and vexation of spirit.

But had she wedded with the purpose that the believing wife should convert the unbelieving, or confirm the doubting, husband, what then had been her reward?
Love and honour upon earth, and an inheritance in Heaven with Queen Margaret and those heroines who have been the nursing mothers of the church." Hitherto Catharine had sat upon a stone beside the priest's feet, and looked up to him as she spoke or listened; but now, as if animated by calm, yet settled, feelings of disapprobation, she rose up, and, extending her hand towards the monk as she spoke, addressed him with a countenance and voice which might have become a cherub, pitying, and even as much as possible sparing, the feelings of the mortal whose errors he is commissioned to rebuke.
"And is it even so ?" she said, "and can so much of the wishes, hopes, and prejudices of this vile world affect him who may be called tomorrow to lay down his life for opposing the corruptions of a wicked age and backsliding priesthood?
Can it be the severely virtuous Father Clement who advises his child to aim at, or even to think of, the possession of a throne and a bed which cannot become vacant but by an act of crying injustice to the present possessor?
Can it be the wise reformer of the church who wishes to rest a scheme, in itself so unjust, upon a foundation so precarious?
Since when is it, good father, that the principal libertine has altered his morals so much, to be likely to court in honourable fashion the daughter of a Perth artisan?
Two days must have wrought this change; for only that space has passed since he was breaking into my father's house at midnight, with worse mischief in his mind than that of a common robber.

And think you that, if Rothsay's heart could dictate so mean a match, he could achieve such a purpose without endangering both his succession and his life, assailed by the Douglas and March at the same time, for what they must receive as an act of injury and insult to both their houses?
Oh! Father Clement, where was your principle, where your prudence, when they suffered you to be bewildered by so strange a dream, and placed the meanest of your disciples in the right thus to reproach you ?" The old man's eyes filled with tears, as Catharine, visibly and painfully affected by what she had said, became at length silent.
"By the mouths of babes and sucklings," he said, "hath He rebuked those who would seem wise in their generation.

I thank Heaven, that hath taught me better thoughts than my own vanity suggested, through the medium of so kind a monitress.