As regards all human feeling and earthly life, dead!
And just as she hoped this was attained, a voice—a poor, friendly child's voice—falls on her ear, and she finds that what she deemed death was only a dream in an undisturbed slumber, and that the whole work has to begin again.
It is a fearful combat, this concentrating all the powers of life on producing death in life.
Can this be what God means?
Thank God, at least, that my vocation is lower. The humbling work in the infirmary, and the trials of temper in the school of the novices, seem to teach me more, and to make me feel that I am nothing and have nothing in myself, more than all my efforts to feel nothing.
My "Theologia" says, indeed, that true self-abnegation is freedom; and freedom cannot be attained until we are above the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. Elsè cannot bear this; and when I spoke of it the other day to poor Sister Beatrice, she said it bewildered her poor brain altogether to think of it. But I do not take it in that sense. I think it must mean that love is its own reward; and grieving Him we love, who has so loved us, our worst punishment. And that seems to me quite true.
XII.
Elsè's Story.
Wittemberg, June, 1512.