But with the latter gradations of penance I was not myself satisfied. I was enjoined only solitude and a daily use of the knotted rope; but I stedfastly refused every better sort of food which was now offered to me; and when at last allowed to enter the church, I lay for whole days on the cold marble floor, before the shrine of St Rosalia, and chastised myself in my cell in the most cruel and immoderate degree. By these outward sufferings, I thought that I should overcome the more fearful pains by which I was inwardly tormented, but in vain! Those phantoms, the off-spring of my own perturbed imagination, always returned, and I believed myself given up a helpless prey to Satan, who thus, for his own special divertisement, assailed me, and enticed me to commit those sins in thought, which in deed were no longer in my power.
The severe penance imposed upon me, and the unheard-of perseverance with which it was fulfilled, excited in the highest degree the attention of the monks. They contemplated me with a kind of reverential awe, and many times I heard whisperings among them—"He is indeed a saint!" This expression was to me unspeakably distressing, for it reminded me vividly of that moment in the Capuchin Convent of Königswald, when, in my outrageous delirium, I had called out to the spectral painter, "I am the blessed St Anthony!"
The very last and concluding stage of the penance imposed by the Prior, had now passed away, yet I had never desisted from self-martyrdom. Nature seemed unable to bear up any longer against the violence which I inflicted. My eyes were dim and sunk in their sockets. My bleeding frame was become a mere skeleton, so that, when for hours I had lain on the marble floor, I was not able to raise myself till the monks came to assist me.
At last, the Prior one day sent for me to his consulting-room. "Brother," said he, "do you now feel, after the severe penance you have undergone, your mind soothed and lightened? Have the consolations of Heaven been poured upon you?"
In the hollow tone of despair, I answered him, "No!"
"Brother," he resumed, "when, after your confession of horrid crimes, I inflicted on you that severe penance, I satisfied the laws of the church, which demand that a malefactor whom the arm of justice has not reached, but who voluntarily confesses his evil actions, should also, by his outward conduct, prove the reality of his repentance. Yet I believe, (and the best authorities are on my side,) that the most excruciating torments which the penitent can inflict on himself, do not, as soon as he himself grounds any confidence on these exercises, diminish, by one fraction, the amount of his guilt. To no human intellect is it given to explain how the omniscient and eternal Ruler measures and weighs the deeds of mankind; but lost for ever must that mortal be, who deludes himself with expectations of taking Heaven by storm, through the force of penitential infliction.
"Moreover, the individual who believes that, by the fulfilment of such duties, the crimes of which he has been convicted are, of necessity, blotted out and atoned, proves, by this very belief, that his inward repentance has neither been true nor complete. But as for you, dear brother Medardus, you have yet experienced no consolation, and this, in my opinion, proves the truth of your conversion. Give up now, I command you, all chastisements—allow yourself better food, and no longer avoid the society of your brethren.
"Learn, besides, that your extraordinary life, with all its complicated involvements, is better known to me than it is even to yourself. A fatality from which you could not escape, gave to the devil a certain influence over you; and, while you committed crimes which to your own nature were abhorrent, you were only his tool, or implement.
"Dream not, however, that you are on this account less sinful in the eyes of Heaven, or of the church, for on you was bestowed ample power, if you had had the resolution to exert it, to conquer in a spirited battle the fiend who beset you. In what mortal heart has not this influence of our arch-enemy raged like a tempest, resisting every impulse of good? But without this conflict, virtue could have no existence—For in what doth virtue consist, but in the triumph (after a hard-fought battle) of good over evil?
"But, as one source of consolation, I can inform you, that you have accused yourself of a crime wherein you have been guilty in intention, but not in effect. Aurelia yet lives. In your madness you probably wounded yourself, and it was your own blood that streamed over your hands. Aurelia still lives;—this fact I have amply ascertained."