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I went to one party long ago, and they commanded me, as the price of their sympathy, even of anything but their denunciations, to ignore, if not to abjure, all the very points on which I came for light--my love for the Beautiful and the Symbolic--my desire to consecrate and christianise it--my longing for a human voice to tell me with authority that I was forgiven--my desire to find some practical and palpable communion between myself and the saints of old.

They told me to cast away, as an accursed chaos, a thousand years of Christian history, and believe that the devil had been for ages.

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