“We read of temptations from devils which the saints have undergone; there are those who presume to doubt them. This man wrestled with temptations from his brother men, who seemed like very fiends, and often, often, the anguish of despair came upon him, and he thought he was already lost, and a wild desire almost overwhelmed him to join them in their evil ways. For, by some horrible instinct, they seemed to divine that pain to the body would be slight to him compared to the tortures which they could invent for his soul. They came to his ministrations, and mimicked him when he spoke, and set their ribald songs to sacred tunes. Before his door they parodied the holiest rites. They taught the children to do the same things at their sports.
“And he—it is said that in the pauses of midnight or noontide rout and wild temptation they heard him praying for them, and praying for himself, like one who had bound up his own life in the bundle of their lives, and believed that he would be lost or saved with them. It is said that at times he rushed out among them like S. Michael, and his voice was as a trumpet, and he spoke of the wrath of God; and, again, he would open his door, and his face would be like death, and he would tremble sorely, as he begged them, like some tortured creature, to cease from sin. What they did was to him as if he did it. He was so of them that their temptations were his also, till he often seemed to himself as sunk in sin as any of them.
“Yet, one by one, souls went to God from that fiend-beleaguered place; babes with the cross hardly dry upon their foreheads; children taught to love the God whom once they had only known to curse; some of those sick made for ever well, some of those lepers made for ever clean. The priest set up crosses on their graves, and sacrilegious hands broke them down; but no hands could stop his prayers and praises for the souls that by God’s blessing he had won. He tried to build a little chapel, and they rent it stone from stone; but none could destroy the temple of living stones built up to God out of that mournful spot.
“A Lent came when as never before he strove with and for these people. It was as if an angel spoke to them. An angel? Nay, a very man like themselves, as tempted as any of them, a sinner suffering from his sin; yet a man and a sinner who loved God, believed in God, knew that he would come to judge, yet knew he was mighty to save. That Lent, Satan himself held sway there; new and more vile and awful blasphemies surged through the place; it was his last carnival, and it was a mad one. Men held women back from church if they wished to worship, but followed them there and elsewhere to darker deeds of sacrilege and revelry than even they had known before. Yet in the gray dawn, when sleep overpowered the revellers, a few people crept to that holy hut round which the sinners had danced their dance of defiance and death and sin, and there sought for pardon and blessing, and knelt before the Lord, who shunned not the poor earth-altar where a priest pleaded daily for souls, as for so long he had done, except on the rare occasions when he would be gone for a night and a day, they knew not where, and return with fresh vigor and courage.
“Thursday in Holy Week he kept his watch with the Master in his agony. Round him the storm of evil deeds and words rose high. In the midst of it the rioters thought they saw a vision. It was a moonlight night, and marvellously still; no wind moved the trees, and the water was like glass. But all the silence of earth was broken by hideous shout and song, and all its brightness turned to darkness by such deeds of evil as Christians may not name. Before those creatures steeped in sin, wallowing in it, one stood suddenly, haggard, spent as beneath some great burden, wan as with awful suffering. The moonbeams wrapped him in unearthly light, he seemed of heaven, and yet a sufferer. He did not speak; how could he speak, who had pleaded with them again and again by day, and spent his nights in prayer, for such return as this? He lifted up his eyes, and spread his arms. He looked to them like one upon a cross. ‘The Christ! The Christ!’ they murmured, awestruck. And then, ‘Slay him!’ some one shouted frantically. There came a crash of stones, of wood, of jagged iron, and in the midst a distinct, intense voice, ‘O Lord Jesus, forgive us.’ They had heard the last of the prayers that vexed them.
“On Good Friday morning, as the brotherhood came from Prime, a strange being, more like a beast than a man,, approached them. ‘Come to us,’ he said in a scarcely intelligible dialect—‘come to the Dol des Fées: The abbot asked no questions, and made no delay. He bade one of the older monks accompany him, and together they sought the place. Before they reached it, sounds of loud, hoarse wailing were borne to them upon the breeze; and their guide, on hearing them, broke forth into groans like the groans of a beast, and beat his breast, and cried, ‘My father, my father! My sin, my sin!’
“They saw hovels and caves, deserted; among the poorest, one still poorer; about it, men, women, and children wrung their hands or sobbed and tore their hair, or lay despairing on the ground. Entering, four bare walls met their view; then a pallet, where an idiot grinned and pointed. Following his pointing finger, they saw an earth-altar where the light still burned. Before it one lay at rest. Wrapped in his tattered robe; his hands clasped, as though he prayed yet, above the crucifix upon his heart; hands, neck, and face bruised and battered and red with blood; his face was of one at peace. The contest was ended. He who lay there dead lay there a victor, by the grace of God. Around him his people, for whom he gave his life, begged for the very help they had so long refused. And soon, where so long he labored, sowing good seed in tears, the reapers went with shouting, bringing their sheaves with them. That which had been the abode of sinners has become years since the abode of saints.
“Thanks be to God!”
“But it was such a little sin,” I said, as Anne put the paper by.
“How great a sin lost Eden?” she asked gravely. “Besides, we cannot tell what spiritual pride or carelessness, unknown or hidden, may have led to such a fall. But, dear, it was not anything of that sort I wanted to talk about, but the mercy, and how it explains what we were speaking of.”