child, and seized the moment you were coming to Christ, to cast you down, and tear you? How shall I--how shall the fraternity, and all the souls who are to escape from punishment by the merit of your prayers, answer to God for your horrible apostacy?” “Let them answer for themselves--let every one of us answer for ourselves--that is the dictate of reason.” “Of reason, my deluded child,--when had reason any thing to do with religion?” I had sat down, folded my arms on my breast, and forbore to answer a word. The Superior stood with his arms crossed, his head declined, his whole figure in an air of profound and mortified contemplation. Any one else would have imagined him seeking God in the abysses of meditation, but I felt he was only seeking him where he is never to be found,--in the abyss of that heart which is “deceitful and desperately wicked.” He approached--I exclaimed, “Come not near me!--you will renew again the story of my submission--I tell you it was artificial;--of my regularity in devotional exercises--it was all mechanism or imposture;--of my conformity to discipline--it was all practised with the hope of escaping from it ultimately. Now, I feel my conscience discharged and my heart lightened. Do you hear, do you understand me? These are the first words of truth I ever uttered since I entered these walls--the only ones that will, perhaps, ever be uttered within them--aye, treasure them up, knit your brows, and cross yourself, and elevate your eyes as you will. Go on with your religious drama. What is there you see before you so horrible, that you recoil, that you cross yourself, that you lift your eyes and hands to heaven?--a creature whom despair has driven to utter desperate truth! Truth may be horrible to the inmates of a convent, whose whole life is artificial and perverted,--whose very hearts are sophisticated beyond the hand even of Heaven (which they alienate by their hypocrisy) to touch. But I feel I am at this moment an object of less horror in the sight of the Deity, than if I were standing at his altar, to (as you would urge me) insult him with vows, which my heart was bursting from my bosom to contradict, at the moment I uttered them.” “At these words, which I must have uttered with the most indecent and insulting violence, I almost expected the Superior would have struck me to the earth,--would have summoned the lay-brothers to bear me to confinement,--would have shut me up in the dungeon of the convent, for I knew there was such a place. Perhaps I wished for all this. Driven to extremity myself, I felt a kind of pride in driving others to it in return. Any thing of violent excitement, of rapid and giddy vicissitude, or even of intense suffering, I was prepared for, and equal to, at that moment. But these paroxysms soon exhaust themselves and us by their violence.