"Give me the kiss," answered the teacher, but he turned his back to her at the same time. However, she did not notice this, as she could not distinguish back from front. Now his eyes were opened, and he saw how within the temple they were offering incense to their "gods of light," as they called them. There stood the murderer Barabbas, a halo round his head, and a plate on his breast with the inscription: "Acquitted because of insufficient evidence." There sat Judas Iscariot under his fig-tree, with the thirty pieces of silver, in the bosom of his family, promoted to be general-director of customs. There were the Emperor Nero, fresh from the bath, with a white dove on his hand, and Julian the Apostate near an altar, with geese sacrificed upon it.
The priests and priestesses sang a chant of New Birth and Resurrection, burned incense compounded of rose-leaves and arsenic-acid, and danced a snake-dance, which they called "the joy of life." Then they began to quarrel about a laurel-wreath, and fought one another. As the teacher went, they all sat there in the darkness and wept. But when a fresh north wind blew through the temple, they trembled like dry leaves.
Blind and Deaf.—The teacher said: "There are, as you know, people with whom one cannot be angry. Perhaps it is because of their natural good-nature, which shines even through a cutting jest. And there are people whose malice comes to light long after one has met them. Such an after-effect I have experienced myself.
"Five-and-twenty years after a conversation with a man, I felt angry with him. Naturally, during a sleepless night, when memory threw a new light on the scene which had taken place between us. Not till then did the insulting word he spoke receive its proper signification, which I now understood. There are words which can murder. Such a word this one was. What a good thing that I did not understand it at the time! It would have resulted in calamity to four people.
"By developing a peculiar instinct I have succeeded in fabricating a kind of diving-costume, with which I protect myself in society. When the insulting word or the biting allusion is uttered, the sound certainly reaches my ear, but the receptive apparatus refuses to let it go further. In the same way I can make myself literally blind. I obliterate the face of the person I dislike. How it is done, I do not know, but it seems to be a psychological process. The face becomes a dirty whitish-grey spot and disappears. It is necessary to make oneself deaf and blind, or it is impossible to live.
"One must cancel and go on! That is generally called 'forgiving,' but it may be a device of the revengeful for sparing himself trouble, or a scheme of the sensitive for not letting insults reach him. One cannot undertake more than one can bear!"
The Disrobing Chamber.—The teacher continued: "Swedenborg says in his Inferno...."
"Say 'Hell,'" the pupil interrupted him. "I know that there is a hell, for I have been in it."
"Well, Swedenborg has in his Hell a disrobing chamber into which the deceased are conducted immediately after their death. There they lay aside the dress they have had to wear in society and in the family. Then the angels see at once whom they have before them."
"Does Swedenborg then mean that we are all hypocrites?"