A gentleman, who followed the heresy of Calvin, came to pay a visit to the parents of St. Jane Frances de Chantal. She was then only five years old.
One day, while she was playing in the room where the gentleman was conversing with another person, she heard him say that he did not believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
The Main Altar at the church of SS. Claudius and Andrew of the Burgundians in Rome. Saint Peter Julien Eymard, founder of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, is buried here.
The child looked up from her playthings, and, going over to him, said: ” So you don’t believe that Jesus Christ is present in the Blessed Sacrament?”
“No, child,” he said, “I do not.”
“Yet Jesus Christ has positively declared that He is,” replied the child. “So by saying these words, you mean to say that Jesus Christ is a liar! Well, if you had said as much about the King of this country in my father’s presence, he would send you away from his house, and perhaps kill you! And do you think the great God will not punish you some day, because you have dared to call His dear Son a liar, by saying that you do not believe what He tells you?”
The gentleman was so confounded by these words of the little girl that he did not know what to say. He thought he would appease her by giving her some little presents, so he gave her some very beautiful ones.
But she was very angry at this, and when he put them into her hands she at once threw them into the fire, and said to him while they were burning: “Look, that is the way in which God will punish in the next world all those who refuse to believe the words of His Divine Son Jesus Christ.”
Rev. D. Chisholm, The Catechism in Examples (London: R & T Washbourne, Ltd., 1919), 63-4.
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 340
