When the poor sinner woke in the morning his heart was full of wonder. The night had brought healing. He jumped blithely out of bed. "My Saviour, I will never more leave you."
Something of which he had hardly been conscious suddenly became clear to him. He would take refuge in the Saviour. He would sink himself in Jesus, in whom everything was united that had formed and must form his happiness—his mother, his innocent childhood, his joy in God, his repose and hope, his immortal life. Now he knew, he would rely on his Saviour. He would write a book about Jesus. Not a proper literary work; he could not do that, he had no talent for it. But he would represent the Lord as He lived, he would inweave his whole soul with the being of his Saviour so that he might have a friend in the cell. Then perhaps his terrors would vanish. In former days it had pleased him, so to speak, to write away an anxiety from his heart, not in letters to others, but only for himself. Many things which were not clear to him, which he found incomprehensible—with pen in hand he succeeded in making clearer to his inward eye, so that vague pictures almost assumed corporeal shape. He had in that fashion created many comrades and many companions during his wanderings in strange lands when he was afraid. So now in his forlorn and deserted condition he would try to invite the Saviour into the poor sinner's cell. No outward help was to be hoped, he must evoke it all out of himself. He would venture to implore the Lord Jesus until He came, using his childish memories, the remains of his school learning, the fragments of his reading, and, above all, his mother's Bible stories.
And now the condemned man began to write a book in so far as it was possible to him. At first his dreams and thoughts and figures were disconnected through timidity, and the painful excitement which often made his pulses gallop and his heart stop beating. Then he cowered in the corner, and wept and groaned and struggled in vain with the desire for mortal life. When he succeeded in collecting his thoughts again, and he took up his pen afresh, he gradually regained calm, and each time it lasted longer. And it happened that he often wrote for hours at a stretch, that his cheeks began to glow and his eyes to shine—for he wandered with Jesus in Galilee. Suddenly he would awake from his visions and find himself in his prison cell, and sadness overcame him, but it was no longer a falling into the pit of hell; he was strong enough to save himself on his island of the blessed. And so he wrote and wrote. He did not ask if it was the Saviour of the books. It was his Saviour as he lived in him, the only Saviour who could redeem him. And so there was accomplished in this poor sinner on a small scale what was accomplished among the nations on a large scale; if it was not always the historical Jesus as Saviour, it was the Saviour in whom men believed become historical, since he affected the world's history through the hearts of men. He whom the books present may not be for all men; He who lives in men's hearts is for all. That is the secret of the Saviour's undying power: He is for each man just what that man needs. We read in the Gospels that Jesus appeared at different times and to different men in different forms. That should be a warning to us to let every man have his own Jesus. As long as it is the Jesus of love and trust, it is the right Jesus.
It often happened that during the prisoner's composition and writing, a wider, softer light from the window spread through the cell, flickered over the wall, the floor, the table, and then rested for a space on the white paper. And so light even entered the lonely room, but unspeakably more light entered the writer's heart.
The gaoler saw little of the writing. Directly he rattled his keys, it was hidden under the sheet—just as children hide their treasures from intrusive eyes. When five or six weeks had gone by, hundreds of written sheets lay there.
Konrad placed them in a cover and wrote on it
I.N.R.I.
CHAPTER I
When darkness covers the world men look gladly towards the east. There light dawns. All lights come from out of the east. And the races of men are said to have come hither from that quarter. There is an ancient book, in which is written the beginning of things and of men. The book came from the nation of the Jews, and the old Jews were called the people of God, for they recognised only one eternal God. And great men and holy prophets arose in that nation. The greatest of them was named Moses, and it is written that he it was who brought down to men the Ten Commandments. But the Jews fell on evil times, they sank lower and lower and were heavily oppressed by stronger nations. Like us, they suffered poverty and curses and despair, and this lasted for a thousand years and more. Prophets appeared from time to time, and with words of mercy announced that a Saviour would come to lead the Jews into the kingdom of glory. For that Saviour they waited many hundreds of years. Oftentimes one would appear whom they took for Him, but they were deceived. And when at last the real Saviour, the real, mighty Saviour appeared, they did not recognise Him. For He was different from what they had imagined.