cross and followed Jesus. He sought to make it heavier, the mightiest of
burdens; it was great joy to him to fall beneath its weight, to drag it
on his knees, his back half broken. In it he beheld the only source
of strength for the soul, of joy for the mind, of the consummation of
virtue and the perfection of holiness. In it lay all that was good; all
ended in death upon it. To suffer and to die, those words ever sounded
in his ears, as the end and goal of mortal wisdom. And, when he had
fastened himself to the cross, he enjoyed the boundless consolation of
God's love. It was no longer, now, upon Mary that he lavished filial
tenderness or lover's passion. He loved for love's mere sake, with an
absolute abstract love. He loved God with a love that lifted him out of
himself, out of all else, and wrapped him round with a dazzling radiance
of glory. He was like a torch that burns away with blazing light. And
death seemed to him to be only a great impulse of love.

But what had he omitted to do that he was thus so sorely tried? With
his hand he wiped away the perspiration that streamed down his brow,
and reflected that, that very morning, he had made his usual
self-examination without finding any great guilt within him. Was he not
leading a life of great austerity and mortification of the flesh? Did he
not love God solely and blindly? Ah! how he would have blessed His Holy
Name had He only restored him his peace, deeming him now sufficiently
punished for his transgression! But, perhaps, that sin of his could
never be expiated. And then, in spite of himself, his mind reverted to
Albine and the Paradou, and all their memories.

At first he tried to make excuses for himself. He had fallen, one
evening, senseless upon the tiled floor of his bedroom, stricken with
brain fever. For three weeks he had remained unconscious. His blood
surged furiously through his veins and raged within him like a torrent
that had burst its banks. His whole body, from the crown of his head to
the soles of his feet, was so scoured and renewed and wrought afresh
by the mighty labouring of his ailment, that in his delirium he had
sometimes thought he could hear the very hammer blows of workmen that
nailed his bones together again. Then, one morning, he had awakened,
feeling like a new being. He was born a second time, freed of all that
his five-and-twenty years of life had successively implanted in him. His
childish piety, his education at the seminary