His patron jocularly charged him with playing truant in Church all day long:-- "'Are you turning Molinist ?' I answered quick: 'Sir, what if I turned Christian?
It might be.'" The forged love-letters he instantly sees through.

They are the scorpion--blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna's mouth.

And then Pompilia makes her appeal.

"Take me to Rome!" The Madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice," and he at once receives and accepts "my own fact, my miracle Self-authorised and self-explained," in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,--nay, thought itself fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:-- "I paced the city: it was the first Spring.
By the invasion I lay passive to, In rushed new things, the old were rapt away; Alike abolished--the imprisonment Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world That pulled me down." The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the beginning of life:-- "Death meant, to spurn the ground.
Soar to the sky,--die well and you do that.
The very immolation made the bliss; Death was the heart of life, and all the harm My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp: As if the intense centre of the flame Should turn a heaven to that devoted fly Which hitherto, sophist alike and sage, Saint Thomas with his sober grey goose-quill, And sinner Plato by Cephisian reed, Would fain, pretending just the insect's good, Whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again.
Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was passing swift and sure; Whereof the initiatory pang approached, Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste, Feel at the end the earthly garments drop, And rise with something of a rosy shame Into immortal nakedness: so I Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain." But he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but only completed, the old ideal.

The Church had offered her priest no alternative between the world and the cloister,--self-indulgence and self-slaughter.