In a testamentary epistle to his friends (dated September 1812) he mentions the two motives which withhold him from a public confession. "The one is, that to open a plague pit is dangerous to the health of the still uninfected bystanders; the other, that, in my writings (for which God forgive me), among a wilderness of poisonous fungi and noxious weeds there is to be found here and there a healing herb, from which the poor sick people to whom it might be useful would assuredly shrink back in horror if they knew the pestilential spot in which it had grown." When Werner had (characteristically enough _after_ his conversion) studied theology and made himself acquainted with the Catholic ritual, he was ordained priest. It was in Vienna, in 1814, at the time of the Congress, that he made his first appearance as a preacher. He was most successful. People were impressed by his tall, spare, ascetic figure and his long thin face, with the prominent nose and the dark brown eyes gleaming under heavy eyebrows. He preached to enormous crowds sermons of which the Monk's sermon in _Wallenstein's Lager_ may serve to give a faint idea. They were full of high-flown bombast and disgusting obscenities, united wit and wisdom with ascetic nonsense and tiresome twaddle, overflowed with denunciations of heretics and eulogies of the rosary.[19] Werner died in Vienna in 1823. He is the representative-in-chief of mysticism in literature. His life is the key to his works--works which profoundly impressed his contemporaries, but which interest us chiefly from the pathological point of view. He undoubtedly possessed considerable poetic gifts. His verse is melodious and falls caressingly on the ear, like the church music of southern lands. His characters are generally well planned (take, for example, Franz von Brienne in the first and second acts of _Die Templer auf Cypern_--"The Knights Templar in Cyprus"), and the action interests and keeps us in suspense; but the core and kernel of it all, the threefold kernel of sensuality, religion, and cruelty, is ill-flavoured and unwholesome. His first important work, _Die Söhne des Thals_, which is in two parts, of six acts each, deals with the Order of the Templars. He was obviously inspired to it by the ideas of freemasonry, ideas which had impressed Schubert, had played a part in _Wilhelm Meister_, and had considerably influenced his own private life.