Happily, however, Pianura
offers other opportunities of edification. Father Ignazio is a man of
wide learning and inflexible doctrine, and in several of our
monasteries, notably that of the Barnabites, you will find examples of
sanctity and wisdom such as a young man may well devoutly consider. Our
convents also are distinguished for the severity of their rule and the
spiritual privileges accorded them. The Carmelites have every reason to
hope for the beatification of their aged Prioress, and among the nuns of
the Perpetual Adoration is one who has recently received the ineffable
grace of the vulnus divinum. In the conversation of these saintly nuns,
and of the holy Abbot of the Barnabites, you will find the surest
safeguard against those errors and temptations that beset your age." He
leaned back with a gesture of dismissal; but added, reddening slightly,
as Odo prepared to withdraw: "You will oblige me, cousin, when you meet
my physician, Count Heiligenstern, by not touching on the matter of the
restorative you have seen me take."
Odo left his cousin's presence with a feeling of deep discouragement. To
a spirit aware of the new influences abroad, and fresh from contact with
evils rooted in the very foundations of the existing system, there was a
peculiar irony in being advised to seek guidance and instruction in the
society of ecstatic nuns and cloistered theologians. The Duke, with his
sickly soul agrope in a maze of Neoplatonism and probabilism, while his
people groaned under unjust taxes, while knowledge and intellectual
liberty languished in a kind of moral pest-house, seemed to Odo like a
ruler who, in time of famine, should keep the royal granaries locked and
spend his days praying for the succour that his own hand might have
dispensed.
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