If it had been he might never have rebelled.

For how often it is romance which makes a home for religion in the heart of man, romance which feathers the nest of purity in which the hermit soul delights to dwell! Is it not that bizarre silence of the Algerian waste which leads many a Trappist to his fate, rather than the strange thought of God calling his soul to heavenly dreams and ecstatic renunciations?
Is it not the wild poetry of the sleeping snows by night that gives to the St.Bernard monk his holiest meditations?
When the organ murmurs, and he kneels in that remote chapel of the clouds to pray, is it not the religion of his wonderful earthly situation and prospect that speaks to him loudly, rather than the religion of the far-off Power whose hands he believes to hold the threads of his destinies?
Even the tonsure is a psalm to some, and the robe and cowl a litany.

The knotted cord is a mass and the sandal a prayer.
But Valentine had been a saint by temperament, it seemed, and would be a saint by temperament to the end.

He had not been scourged to a prayerful attitude by sorrow or by pain.

Tears had not made a sea to float him to repentance or to purity.