“I want nothing but to die,” was his answer. His countenance was perfectly calm, but its calmness was rather that of apathy than of resignation.
“You are, then, perfectly sure of your approach to blessedness?”
“I know nothing about it.”
“How, my brother, are those words for a dying man to utter?”
“Yes, if he speaks the truth.”
“But a monk?—a catholic?”
“Those are but names—I feel that truth, at least, now.”
“You amaze me!”
“I care not—I am on the verge of a precipice—I must plunge from it—and whether the bystanders utter outcries or not, is a matter of little consequence to me.”
“And yet, you expressed a willingness to die?”
“Willingness! Oh impatience!—I am a clock that has struck the same minutes and hours for sixty years. Is it not time for the machine to long for its winding up? The monotony of my existence would make a transition, even to pain, desirable. I am weary, and would change—that is all.”
“But to me, and to all the community, you seemed to be resigned to the monastic life.”
“I seemed a lie—I lived a lie—I was a lie—I ask pardon of my last moments for speaking the truth—I presume they neither can refuse me, or discredit my words—I hated the monastic life. Inflict pain on man, and his energies are roused—condemn him to insanity, and he slumbers like animals that have been found enclosed in wood and stone, torpid and content; but condemn him at once to pain and inanity, as they do in convents, and you unite the sufferings of hell and of annihilation. For sixty years I have cursed my existence. I never woke to hope, for I had nothing to do or to expect. I never lay down with consolation, for I had, at the close of every day, only to number so many deliberate mockeries of God, as exercises of devotion. The moment life is put beyond the reach of your will, and placed under the influence of mechanical operations, it becomes, to thinking beings, a torment insupportable.
“I never ate with appetite, because I knew, that with or without it, I must go to the refectory when the bell rung. I never lay down to rest in peace, because I knew the bell was to summon me in defiance of nature, whether it was disposed to prolong or shorten my repose. I never prayed, for my prayers were dictated to me. I never hoped, for my hopes were founded not on the truth of God, but on the promises and threatenings of man. My salvation hovered on the breath of a being as weak as myself, whose weakness I was nevertheless obliged to flatter, and struggle to obtain a gleam of the grace of God, through the dark distorted medium of the vices of man. It never reached me—I die without light, hope, faith, or consolation.”
He uttered these words with a calmness that was more terrific than the wildest convulsions of despair. I gasped for breath—“But, my brother, you were always punctual in your religious exercises.”
“That was mechanism—will you not believe a dying man?”
“But you urged me, in a long conversation, to embrace the monastic life; and your importunity must have been sincere, for it was after my profession.”
“It is natural for the miserable to wish for companions in their misery. This is very selfish, very misanthropic, you will say, but it is also very natural. You have yourself seen the cages suspended in the cells—are not the tame birds always employed to allure the wild ones? We were caged birds, can you blame us for the deception?”
In these words I could not help recognizing that simplicity of profound corruption15—that frightful paralysis of the soul, which leaves it incapable of receiving any impression or making one—that says to the accuser, Approach, remonstrate, upbraid—I defy you. My conscience is dead, and can neither hear, utter, or echo a reproach. I was amazed—I struggled against my own conviction. I said, “But your regularity in religious exercises—”
“Did you never hear a bell toll?”
“But your voice was always the loudest and most distinct in the choir.”
“Did you never hear an organ played?”
I shuddered, yet I still went on with my queries—I thought I could not know too much. I said, “But, my brother, the religious exercises in which you were constantly engaged, must have imperceptibly instilled something of their spirit into you?—is it not so? You must have passed from the forms of religion into its spirit ultimately?—is it not so, my brother? Speak on the faith of a dying man. May I have such a hope! I would undergo anything—anything, to obtain it.”
“There is no such hope,” said the dying man, “deceive not yourself with it. The repetition of religious duties, without the feeling or spirit of religion, produces an incurable callosity of heart. There are not more irreligious people to be found on earth than those who are occupied always in its externals. I verily believe half our lay-brothers to be Atheists. I have heard and read something of those whom we call heretics. They have people to open their pews (shocking profanation you will call it, to sell seats in the house of God, and you are right), they have people to ring bells when their dead are to be interred; and these wretches have no other indication of religion to give, but watching during the whole time of service (in which their
