A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
that terrible day?
And this day will come, shall come, must come; the day of death and the
day of judgement. It is appointed unto man to die and after death the
judgement. Death is certain. The time and manner are uncertain, whether
from long disease or from some unexpected accident: the Son of God
cometh at an hour when you little expect Him. Be therefore ready every
moment, seeing that you may die at any moment. Death is the end of us
all. Death and judgement, brought into the world by the sin of our
first parents, are the dark portals that close our earthly existence,
the portals that open into the unknown and the unseen, portals through
which every soul must pass, alone, unaided save by its good works,
without friend or brother or parent or master to help it, alone and
trembling. Let that thought be ever before our minds and then we cannot
sin. Death, a cause of terror to the sinner, is a blessed moment for
him who has walked in the right path, fulfilling the duties of his
station in life, attending to his morning and evening prayers,
approaching the holy sacrament frequently and performing good and
merciful works. For the pious and believing catholic, for the just man,
death is no cause of terror. Was it not Addison, the great English
writer, who, when on his deathbed, sent for the wicked young earl of
Warwick to let him see how a christian can meet his end? He it is and
he alone, the pious and believing christian, who can say in his heart:
O grave, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?
Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret, the
whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher’s knife had probed deeply
into his disclosed conscience and he felt now that his soul was
festering in sin. Yes, the preacher was right. God’s turn had come.
Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down in its own filth but
the blasts of the angel’s trumpet had driven him forth from the
darkness of sin into the light. The words of doom cried by the angel
shattered in an instant his presumptuous peace. The wind of the last
day blew through his mind; his sins, the jeweleyed harlots of his
imagination, fled before the hurricane, squeaking like mice in their
terror and huddled under a mane of hair.
As he crossed the square, walking homeward, the light laughter of a
girl reached his burning ear. The frail gay sound smote his heart more
strongly than a trumpet-blast, and, not daring to lift his eyes, he
turned aside and gazed, as he walked, into the shadow of the tangled
shrubs. Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being.
The image of Emma appeared before him, and under her eyes the flood of
shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind
had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon
her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that
poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils.
The sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of
the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful
wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; his monstrous
dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel
eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty
confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them
under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or
beneath some hingeless door in some niche in the hedges where a girl
might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly. Mad! Mad!
Was it possible he had done these things? A cold sweat broke out upon
his forehead as the foul memories condensed within his brain.
When the agony of shame had passed from him he tried to raise his soul
from its abject powerlessness. God and the Blessed Virgin were too far
from him: God was too great and stern and the Blessed Virgin too pure
and holy. But he imagined that he stood near Emma in a wide land and,
humbly and in tears, bent and kissed the elbow of her sleeve.
In the wide land under a tender lucid evening sky, a cloud drifting
westward amid a pale green sea of heaven, they stood together, children
that had erred. Their error had offended deeply God’s majesty though it
was the error of two children; but it had not offended her whose beauty
“is not like earthly beauty, dangerous to look upon, but like the
morning star which is its emblem, bright and musical.” The eyes were
not offended which she turned upon him nor reproachful. She placed
their hands together, hand in hand, and said, speaking to their hearts:
—Take hands, Stephen and Emma. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven.
You have erred but you are always my children. It is one heart that
loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you
will be happy together and your hearts will love each other.
The chapel was flooded by the dull scarlet light that filtered through
the lowered blinds; and through the fissure between the last blind and
the sash a shaft of wan light entered like a spear and touched the
embossed brasses of the candlesticks upon the altar that gleamed like
the battle-worn mail armour of angels.
Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would
rain for ever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering
the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the
monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off,
noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly
floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty
days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the
face of the earth.
It might be. Why not?
—_Hell has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth without any
limits_—words taken, my dear little brothers in Christ Jesus, from the
book of Isaias, fifth chapter, fourteenth verse. In the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
The preacher took a chainless watch from a pocket within his soutane
and, having considered its dial for a moment in silence, placed it
silently before him on the table.
He began to speak in a quiet tone.
—Adam and Eve, my dear boys, were, as you know, our first parents, and
you will remember that they were created by God in order that the seats
in heaven left vacant by the fall of Lucifer and his rebellious angels
might be filled again. Lucifer, we are told, was a son of the morning,
a radiant and mighty angel; yet he fell: he fell and there fell with
him a third part of the host of heaven: he fell and was hurled with his
rebellious angels into hell. What his sin was we cannot say.
Theologians consider that it was the sin of pride, the sinful thought
conceived in an instant: _non serviam: I will not serve._ That instant
was his ruin.
He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and
God cast him out of heaven into hell for ever.
—Adam and Eve were then created by God and placed in Eden, in the plain
of Damascus, that lovely garden resplendent with sunlight and colour,
teeming with luxuriant vegetation. The fruitful earth gave them her
bounty: beasts and birds were their willing servants: they knew not the
ills our flesh is heir to, disease and poverty and death: all that a
great and generous God could do for them was done. But there was one
condition imposed on them by God: obedience to His word. They were not
to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree.
—Alas, my dear little boys, they too fell. The devil, once a shining
angel, a son of the morning, now a foul fiend came in the shape of a
serpent, the subtlest of all the beasts of the field. He envied them.
He, the fallen great one, could not bear to think that man, a being of
clay, should possess the inheritance which he by his sin had forfeited
for ever. He came to the woman, the weaker vessel, and poured the
poison of his eloquence into her ear, promising her—O, the blasphemy of
that promise!—that if she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit they
would become as gods, nay as God Himself. Eve yielded to the wiles of
the arch tempter. She ate the apple and gave it also to Adam who had
not the moral courage to resist her. The poison tongue of Satan had
done its work. They fell.
—And then the voice of God was heard in that garden, calling His
creature man to account: and Michael, prince of the heavenly host, with
a sword of flame in his hand, appeared before the guilty pair and drove
them forth from Eden into the world, the world of sickness and
striving, of cruelty and disappointment, of labour and hardship, to
earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. But even then how merciful
was God! He took pity on our poor degraded parents and promised that in
the fullness of time He would send down from heaven One who would
redeem them, make them once more children of God and heirs to the
kingdom of heaven: and that One, that Redeemer of fallen man, was to be
God’s only begotten Son, the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity,
the Eternal Word.
—He came. He was born of a virgin pure, Mary the virgin mother. He was
born in a poor cowhouse in Judea and lived as a humble carpenter for
thirty years until the hour of His mission had come. And then, filled
with love for men, He went forth and called to men to hear the new
gospel.
—Did they listen? Yes, they listened but would not hear. He was seized
and bound like a common criminal, mocked at as a fool, set aside to
give place to a public robber, scourged with five thousand lashes,
crowned with a crown of thorns, hustled through the streets by the
jewish rabble and the Roman soldiery, stripped of his garments and
hanged upon a gibbet and His side was pierced with a lance and from the
wounded body of our Lord water and blood issued continually.
—Yet even then, in that hour of supreme agony, Our Merciful Redeemer
had pity for mankind. Yet even there, on the hill of Calvary, He
founded the holy catholic church against which, it is promised, the
gates of hell shall not prevail. He founded it upon the rock of ages
and endowed it with His grace, with sacraments and sacrifice, and
promised that if men would obey the word of His church they would still
enter into eternal life; but if, after all that had been done for them,
they still persisted in their wickedness, there remained for them an
eternity of torment: hell.
The preacher’s voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant,
parted them. Then he resumed:
—Now let us try for a moment to realise, as far as we can, the nature
of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has
called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a
strait and dark and foulsmelling prison, an abode of demons and lost
souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house
is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by
His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty
of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the
gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the
great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their
awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles
thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a
blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they
are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
—They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives
forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian
furnace lost its heat but not its light so, at the command of God, the
fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns
eternally in darkness. It is a neverending storm of darkness, dark